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EVERYMAN'S WORLD 



BY 

JOSEPH ANTHONY MILBURN 




NEW YORK 

ROBERT J. SHORES, Publisher 

1916 



PC 



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Copyright, 1916, by 

ROBERT J. SHORES, Publisher 

New York 



4& 

SHORES PRESS 
NEW YORK 



W 23 19/6 

©CI.A445780 






In dfcemors of 

WILLIAM BALLARD HOYT 

AN ENTIRE MAN— A PERFECT FRIEND 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I An Intimate Word 1 

II Democracy of the Higher Riches . . 10 

III Greatness of Our Inheritance ... 19 

IV The Magic of the Spirit .... 29 
V Personality 42 

VI A Nexus of the Talents . . . .51 

VII A Fine Egotism 62 

VIII Sphere of Action . 76 

IX Importance of Atmosphere . . . .91 

X Larger Vision 109 

XI Distribution of Life 129 

XII Mastery 147 

XIII Outwardness 164 

XIV Playing the Game 182 

XV Presentness 205 

XVI The Sacrament of Love 226 

XVII Treasures of Darkness 249 

XVIII On the Summit 274 



EVERYMAN'S WORLD 



CHAPTER I 



AN INTIMATE WORD 



My sun has passed the meridian and is moving, 
with rhythmic and deliberate stride, toward the 
western horizon, beyond which lies the alluring 
world of mystery and wonder. 

As I look back over the years, I feel that I 
should say a liturgy of thanksgiving to Fortune 
for the lavishness of her bounty toward me. She 
has not always consulted my desires, nor humored 
my moods. I have found her to be more a Stoic 
than a Sybarite in her manners and methods. She 
has made me pay with a sufficient liberality for 
the many felicities I have enjoyed through the 
grace of her favor. In the things of lesser im- 
portance, the mysterious providence that rules over 
the affairs of men has been rather frugal with me ; 
but I have been blessed beyond measure in the 



2 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

one treasure of priceless significance, the treasure 
of life. I have lived! With a great passion of 
gratitude flooding my heart, I can say, without 
extravagance, that through all the years life, de- 
spite its seriousness and its shadow, has been a 
sweet triumph. If I maintain, until the curtain 
falls upon the final act of the marvelous drama, the 
serene vision of the day of entire sanity and per- 
fect health, the Nunc Dimittis will be said with 
a smile upon my lips. To use the quaint phrase 
of our more spiritual fathers of the long ago, my 
adieu shall be "an ejaculatory prayer" — "O God, 
I thank Thee for the wondrous glory of the world 
and the unspeakable beatitude of life !" 

In the largest sense, life has lacked, for me, 
somewhat in the completeness and the smoothness 
of its adjustments. I have lived in medias res, be- 
tween two worlds — the one dead, the other power- 
less to be born. I came in my early youth to this 
great and wonderful country. I am proud of my 
American citizenship. It is a citizenship polit- 
ically without the least taint of hyphenation. I 
believe with all my heart in the toast of Stephen 
Decatur, "Our country . . . may she always be 
in the right; but our country, right or wrong!" 



AN INTIMATE WORD 3 

I exult in America, in its noble spaces, its superb 
historic accomplishment, its regal hospitality; and 
in the alertness, the intelligence, the interesting- 
ness and the efficiency of its people. And yet the 
color of place, the physical genius, the national 
habit of thought and action and speech, the tradi- 
tion of ideals and of manners, that I imbibed as a 
sensitive lad in the north of England have lingered 
with me, an unforgettable legacy of impressions 
that have deepened with the years. I am in the 
matter of political temperament and national 
fealty altogether American, but some part of me, 
the folk-consciousness, the inheritance of Albion, 
refused to voyage with me to these hospitable 
shores. My spirit still hovers, with a tenderness 
and a longing that almost touch the edge of pain, 
over the old scenes, over the Cheviot Hills, the 
moors, the braes, the burns and the meadows, beau- 
tiful with the glamour that fills the uncritical eyes 
and saturated with the joy that dwells in the care- 
free heart of youth. 

While living in the Middle West it was my 
privilege to enjoy the noble friendship of a man 
who was a Jew with a strain of the Gentile in his 
veins. A tender, almost feminine, sorrow rested 



4 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

upon his soul, the unmistakable sorrow that is so 
often consequent upon racial miscegenation. He 
was deficient in the unity of racial type. The 
Gentile was an alien in the heart of the Jew. and 
the Jew was an unwelcome guest in the heart of 
the Gentile. The elements of race in him were 
incommiscible. They were too well-bred to clash, 
and too intensely individual and characteristic to 
harmonize. He was an inhabitant, by necessity, 
of two hemispheres; and the ceaseless, silent con- 
troversy of race in his blood wrought a deep sor- 
row in his heart. My life has been burdened, very 
slightly, but still quite perceptibly, by the abiding 
shadow of a miscegenation of a somewhat dif- 
ferent kind, the miscegenation of nationalities. I 
am American, but not wholly, incontrovertibly 
American. The tree of my soul has grown in the 
generous air of this glorious country, but the roots 
are way over there, far across the sea, in England 
— in the England of the north country, the Eng- 
land of the border feuds and border minstrelsy. 

I have been denied, by reason of the infelicity 
of my individual tastes and reticences, the some- 
what questionable delight of popularity — a de- 
light that, despite its questionableness, gives a 



AN INTIMATE WORD 5 

vivid zest to life, and that atones for a multitude 
of privations and delinquencies. Popularity is 
an opiate. It is the most potent anodyne of the 
spirit. With one movement of its magic fingers, 
it magnifies our vanity and draws a curtain before 
the eye of the soul, veiling from its sight the bar- 
renness of its actual possessions. 

I am not sure whether I should rejoice in my 
obscurity as a token of good fortune or bow my 
head in an act of contrition because the Goddess 
of Fame has swept by me with an austere disdain. 
There was an hour in the mid-morning of life when 
this lady of illusions sought converse with me. 
She approached me, a winsome presence, gently 
undulating like the waves of the ocean in its tran- 
quil mood, robed in garments of light and tremu- 
lous with the loveliness of an April day which con- 
ceals in the hard brilliance of the sunshine the 
destructive storm, the violence of hail and light- 
ning and wind that lurks in its treacherous heart. 
She encircled me with her charms, and I was al- 
most on the verge of capitulating to her seductions 
when it occurred to me to ask the terms of the 
compact. 

"The superlative talent,'' she answered. "But, 



6 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

alas !" I said, "the superlative talent is not mine. 
I do not belong, by profusion of temperament or 
affluence of faculty, with the lords of light, the 
creators of beauty, or the rulers of men. I have 
neither the afflatus nor the power of endurance to 
reach the towering heights where the masters dwell 
and reign with the ease of rulership that is the 
distinction of the mighty ones of earth. The gift 
extraordinary has been withheld from me. I can- 
not speak in the great way. I cannot think in the 
great way. I cannot write in the great way. I 
cannot act in the great way. I belong to the 
world of ordinary men, the men of the single tal- 
ent ; and the man of the single talent can no more 
achieve the honors of the man of the two or the 
five talents than the finite can achieve the in- 
finite." 

"Ah ! but there is yet another way," replied my 
lady, "to the paradise of popular esteem. It is 
not so pleasant, so high, so royal a way as the 
way of the superlative gift, but it will bring you 
with certain step to the goal you seek. Since 
you cannot soar, you must learn to stoop — stoop 
to conquer. Shut your eyes to the vision of the 
ideal! Meet the multitude on its own plane of 



AN INTIMATE WORD 7 

life — think with its mind, love with its heart, hate 
with its passions, pray with its prejudices, wor- 
ship with its animosities, humor its moods, flatter 
its vanities as a sycophant, follow in its footsteps 
as a slave, while posing as its counselor and leader 
— and the world will crown you with its honors 
and gladden your heart with its applause!" 

"But, dear lady of renown," I pleaded, "these 
very mundane terms offend my sense of honor. 
They would involve the spirit in a ceaseless finesse 
that would be blighting and ignominious. Fame 
is important: it enhances the talent and enlarges 
the sphere of opportunity and of service ; but it is 
surely not worth the cost of the soul. I would 
rather be a minnow in the running brook whose 
waters are fresh and clear than the largest fish in 
a foul and stagnant pool. There is a goal of 
felicity, and there is a way to that goal; and in 
any well-ordered life the way is as important as 
the goal, and as vital to one's well-being, to one's 
honor, to one's supreme and ultimate achieve- 
ment." 

Thereupon the goddess, flashing upon me eyes of 
beauteous witchery, but burning with an unmis- 
takable contempt, swept out of my sight, leaving 



8 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

me in a long, unbroken obscurity that has safe- 
guarded my peace of mind from the fretting touch 
of envy and afforded me many hours for happy 
communion with the haunting and elusive myster- 
ies of life, the mystery of the Infinite Spirit, the 
mystery of nature, the mystery of humanity, and 
the lesser — though, to me, the more intimate — 
mystery of my own soul. 

Yet, despite the mild anxieties born of modest 
circumstances, the slender measure of my impor- 
tance and the secret sorrows that I carry in the in- 
most privacy of my heart, wherever I go and what- 
ever I do, I have found life to be a success — not 
a high success measured in the terms of the spec- 
tacular and imposing, but an infinite success con- 
strued in the terms of life and love and beauty. 
The years, bringing in their viewless hands a count- 
less wealth of treasure, have wound their way 
through my heart with a cumulative sweetness 
and a lyric charm. A discovery has been vouch- 
safed to me which is more essentially interwoven 
with the melodious flow of life than the most vital 
discoveries of science. To rejoice in the bliss, 
the bounty and the beauty of the sun, we happily 
need no familiarity with the physics of light and 



AN INTIMATE WORD 9 

of heat. To enjoy the grace of contour and the 
fragrance of the flower world — of the primrose, 
the carnation, the violet, the daisy — we need not 
go from garden to garden, from meadow to 
meadow, with a botany in hand. But to live our 
life with an abounding consciousness of its mag- 
nitude, its freedom, its joyousness, its beguiling 
beauty — this is an art. It is the supreme art, for 
it is the art in which all other arts — music, paint- 
ing, sculpture, literature — find their raison d'etre 
and their completion. Unlike the lesser arts, how- 
ever, the art of life is a democracy, and its secrets 
unfold themselves with a noble impartiality to 
all who ask in the power of a great passion and seek 
in the devotion of a tireless patience. 



CHAPTER II 

DEMOCRACY OF THE HIGHER RICHES 

A great and beautiful life is quite easily within 
the grasp of every one. It is permitted to the 
few only to be highly prosperous in material things, 
for physical wealth is by its very nature oligarchic 
and exclusive. What one man owns, his neighbor 
cannot own. The possession of the few necessar- 
ily involves the dispossession of the multitudes, 
for material riches are limited and not universal. 
The world of property is inexorably a world of 
inequality, of division, of caste, of mastery and 
of servitude. 

Nor can the more ethereal rewards of the in- 
tellectual life be the portion of the multitudes, 
since to attain the distinction that belongs to the 
highly cultured mind there must be leisure, an in- 
spirational environment, academic opportunity, 
and, above all, a virility and prowess of intellect 
that by reason of its excess of endowment be- 

10 



HIGHER RICHES 11 

comes a force of separation and preeminence. 
The Alps would lose their significance as objects 
of wonder and admiration, were all mountains of 
alpine dignity and elevation. Shakespeare is 
Shakespeare by virtue of his magical talents and 
his supernal faculties. He reigns alone because 
of the majesty and lavishness of his endowments. 
There must be a rare conspiracy of gift, sphere 
and opportunity before one can grave in song 
"The Grecian Urn" of Keats, or achieve the rich- 
ness, the luxuriousness and the delicacy of the 
prose of Edmund Burke. 

Celebrity, whether it be in the domain of let- 
ters, of painting, or of sculpture, means exclusive- 
ness. Were the victorious life and intellectual 
distinction synonymous, the most of us would be 
condemned by the paucity of our gifts and the 
feebleness of our light to utter failure. Stars of 
the first magnitude constitute a very limited aris- 
tocracy in the sidereal world, and intellects of 
planetary mass and compass likewise constitute a 
very imposing and select aristocracy in the king- 
dom of the fine arts. The majority of us are 
committed to certain disappointment if we seek to 
find our well-being in the glamour of social pres- 



12 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tige, of publicity, of fame. The few are illus- 
trious and important purely by the law of con- 
trast. A man in a great measure creates his own 
personality, but fame, prestige, reputation — these 
factitious and external honors are conferred and 
not seldom thrust upon him by the multitudes, 
who, in the act of crowning their king, admit their 
own inferiority. It is axiomatic that the distinc- 
tion of the gods involves the indistinction of their 
satellites and subjects. Were all wild animals 
lions, the lion would cease to be the monarch of the 
jungle. The lion is the monarch because the lesser 
tribes fear him and acclaim the magistracy of his 
strength. Our pursuit, then, of the great life is 
foredoomed to sheer failure if we seek for it in 
the world of acrid competition, with its sequential 
victory and preeminency for the few and its cer- 
tain defeat and obscurity for the many. It is 
demonstrably clear that the most of us can be 
neither imposingly rich nor commanding of in- 
tellect, nor outstanding in our social importance. 
Concentrated strength implies a diffused weakness, 
just as the brilliancy of the stars implies the vast 
interstellar darkness we call night. 

I said the great, the beautiful, the triumphant 



HIGHER RICHES 13 

life is a democracy. Its prerogatives are the pre- 
rogatives of all. Its honors are the honors of all. 
Its blessings are the blessings of all. By virtue 
of its divine catholicity, it rises above all distinc- 
tions of power, of talent, of environment, of for- 
tune. Granted an adequate passion of desire and 
a sufficient instinct of pursuit, the essential treas- 
ures of life are equally within the reach and real- 
ization of the rich and the poor, the high and the 
low, the scholar and the peasant, the master and 
the servant. The empyrean of vision, beauty, 
love, freedom — the supersensual over-world where 
the great spirits of this earth have their abode — 
is insusceptible of division and circumscription. 
The kingdom of heaven is catholic and universal. 
Its citizenship is a divine proletariat. The earth 
is, and perhaps ought to be, the sphere of an ag- 
gressive and insistent individualism, but the sky 
is splendidly communistic. However vast and 
dominant my talent of appropriation may be, I 
cannot delimit the stars. I cannot write in lines 
of shadow the word "mine" athwart the light of 
Jupiter, or of Venus. David, the gifted son of 
Jesse, was richer as a shepherd lad than he was 
as the crowned king of Israel. As king, he reigned 



i 4 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

over only a small fragment of the earth's surface : 
as shepherd-poet, he was the owner of the heavens 
and of the great Jehovah's glory. As king, he 
was possessed of a kingdom narrowly bounded by 
space, by time and by the caprices of his subjects: 
as poet and prophet, he was dowered with the un- 
circumfered wealth of the whole world. 

The unkempt gamin of the streets and gutters, 
if he be blessed with the seeing eye and the sensi- 
tive imagination of the poet, is more successful so 
far as the actual wealth of life is concerned than 
the plethoric landowner who has so submerged his 
soul in the economic values of his narrow acres 
that he has lost the larger vision of the firmament, 
its immensity and its splendor. Villon, though a 
wastrel and a vagabond, lived a more victorious 
life than the most resplendent courtier of his day, 
for the real knight is more than a creature of 
ribands and garters; he is a man of spacious 
thoughts, of subtle imaginations, of high and fine 
emotions. Who would not rather be Villon, a 
vagrant and an outcast, rich in the talents and the 
beatitudes of the kingdom of beauty, than the 
most illustrious prince of his generation, clothed 
with an ephemeral prestige and adorned with daz- 



HIGHER RICHES 15 

zling honors, who lived his brief day of empty 
and paltry glory to sink at last into an oblivion 
that no resurrection shall disturb ! 

Where are the rich ; where are the noble ; where 
are the priests and the high priests ; where are the 
potentates; where are the scribes and the masters 
learned in the law of the day of Jesus of Galilee? 
Who thinks of them; who knows them; who 
honors them? But the sweet and gracious Gali- 
lean — "the best of men that e'er wore earth about 
him, . . . the first true gentleman that ever 
breathed" — we remember Him; we know Him; 
we honor Him; we crown Him with our praise 
and magnify Him with our worship, our adora- 
tion and our love! Why this homage? He was 
poor. He was of obscure origin. He had a 
limited and meager education. He was wholly 
without social luster and without the distinction 
that belongs to academic culture. He was a king 
without a kingdom — a prophet whose mottled dis- 
cipleship was constituted chiefly of tanners, pub- 
licans, fishermen, nondescripts, disreputables and 
prodigals. His gospel does not amicably consort 
with the actualities of common life. His moral- 
ity is of an inconvenient fineness. There is no 



16 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

community of nature between His celestial ideal- 
ism and our very terrestrial instincts and propen- 
sions. His empire was Golgotha, and His throne 
a cross. Yet, despite His poverty, His local in- 
significance, the isolation wrought by His won- 
drous ideality, the immediate failure of His 
dreams, the collapse of His ambitions and the 
tragical consummation of His august Messianic 
enterprise, He lives to-day the supreme figure of 
history — His gospel a transcendent power, His 
church the most magisterial and formative insti- 
tution in the world, and His life a life of superla- 
tive authority and beauty and triumph. The 
Jesus of Israel reigns the most kingly presence in 
historic time, and rules the over-lord of every 
heart responsive to the appeal and the charm of 
the ideal and the alluring beauty of holiness, be- 
cause He lived His swift and eager days, with a 
solitary grandeur of vision, of passion and of de- 
votion, in a blessed coalescence with the Eternal; 
and to live in blessed coalescence with the Eternal 
is to live and to love and to serve and to accom- 
plish in the grand manner, in the great and mag- 
nificent way. 



HIGHER RICHES 17 

This fair, white world of the spirit; this high, 
far-sweeping world of flame and light and grace 
and freedom and love, where Socrates, Vergil, 
Raphael, Thomas a Kempis, Shakespeare, Dante, 
Fenelon, Lincoln, St. John, Buddha, Jesus have 
found inspiration, mastery, serenity of mind, the 
peace of the celestial vision and the life triumph- 
ant, the life whose beauty faileth not, and "whose 
glory fadeth not away" — this world is your in- 
heritance and mine. It is a divine patrimony, of 
whose treasures and felicities we can be deprived 
only by our own obtuseness and perversity. No 
man need suffer defeat; no man need crucify his 
spirit with the dark consciousness of failure; no 
man need miss the way to the Land of Promise, 
the City of God, if he have but the fortitude to 
break once and forever from the most false and 
the most cruel of all servitudes, the servitude of 
the spirit to the despotism of things and matter 
and externalities, and possess himself of his in- 
alienable heritage, the heritage of a will in sweet 
conformity with the will of the Eternal; a mind 
aglow with the infinity, the wonder and the mys- 
tery of Truth; a heart abounding with a wealth 



18 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of love so divine that it grows while it consumes 
its own substance; a body tremulously sensitive 
to the melody and the music of the world; and a 
spirit transfigured with the light and centered in 
the inerrant wisdom of God. 



CHAPTER III 

GREATNESS OF OUR INHERITANCE 

I remember saying to a mountaineer who was 
in the prime of life, finely intelligent and endowed 
with mechanical gifts of a high order, that he 
should leave his cabin in a southern state and go 
to the city in which I lived, where he would find 
a sphere and an opportunity worthy of his talents. 
His answer to my invitation took on the dignity 
of a revelation. It revealed a largeness of na- 
ture and a sweep of imagination that brought, as 
with a lightning's flash, the poverty and the prose 
of my own ideals of well-being into painful visi- 
bility. 

"Why should I go to a city"? What would I 
find there to interest me*? I should earn a little 
more money, and, perhaps, work would be more 
regular. But what would become of me, of my 
life, my soul, my freedom, in the city, with its 
narrow streets, its smoke, its noises, its confusions, 

19 



20 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

its cramped quarters, its unrest and its suffocating 
air*? I should perish in the city. I should be 
homesick — homesick for the sky, for the cliffs, for 
the forests, for the birds, for the largeness and 
the freedom of the mountain life." As he spoke, 
he opened wide his arms as if to include the planet 
in his embrace. "What a world it is," said this 
woodsman-poet of the Cumberland plateau — 
"what a world it is, so wonderful, so interesting, so 
changing; such a great, kind, loving, companion- 
able world ! Wherever you look, or wherever you 
go, there you find life and beauty. And then, 
there is so much room ! It is all so big. The sky 
is big. The storms are big. The forests are big. 
The mountains are big. The sunrise and the sun- 
set are big. The days are big with the sheer joy of 
living. The nights are big with splendor and 
silence and repose." 

Then came the affirmation of an egoism that was 
divine in its audacity and its finality: "All this 
is mine — all this freedom, this beauty, this sky, 
this mountain world is mine! No man can take 
it from me. It is all mine. It is my kingdom. 
It is my inheritance. It is all I have. It is all I 
want — all I ever want. It has a satisfaction for 



OUR INHERITANCE 21 

every need, a message for every mood, a strength 
for every emergency. The boisterous winds of 
March, the caressing breeze of a June day, the 
trees and the bushes — the oaks, the white oak, the 
red oak, the black oak, the hickory, the poplar, 
the ash, the walnut, the black gum, the sumac — 
the birds, the red bird, the mocking bird, the tur- 
tledove, the goldfinch, the thrush — all the music 
and the color of this mountain world fill my spirit 
with a great and sweet contentment. I am sat- 
isfied, perfectly satisfied with my riches, my posses- 
sions, my kingdom. I am happy. Can you say 
as much for yourself*? No, you take the city and 
its gold. My wealth is here, in the free air, in 
all the varied loveliness and the glorious spaces 
of the hills, the plains and the sky." 

This woodsman of the mountains, by virtue of 
the inheritance of a kingly spirit, had discovered a 
great secret. He had learned to confront life and 
measure its transcendent opportunities with a 
splendid world-consciousness. He was poor, with 
the undistressing poverty of the mountaineer — 
with a poverty that had in it no touch of mean- 
ness or squalor, no hint of shame or degradation. 
He was clad in khaki, somewhat shabby from the 



22 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

fraying touch of time and circumstance. His 
larder contained no greater abundance than pro- 
visions for himself and his family for the space of 
a week. And yet he was rich with all the bound- 
less wealth of the world that he had made his own 
through the poetic sensitiveness of his imagina- 
tion and the imperial sweep of his soul. 

What a world it is that ranges away in a large 
and defiant freedom beyond the petty constrictions 
of our property laws, our deeds, our mortgages, 
our stocks, our bonds, our investments and our 
bank account! It is a world of illimitable vast- 
ness, of exhaustless variety, secreting in its fathom- 
less deeps an infinite mystery, ever inviting our 
scrutiny and our solution. We soar in thought 
into its spaces, and we revel for forty, fifty, seventy 
years in its abysses; and yet we are playing, like 
children on the beach of the ocean, on the edge of 
its boundless wonders. Our minds are attuned 
to the elementary magnitudes of mathematics. 
We think in units — in hundreds, thousands, tens 
and hundreds of thousands — but when we en- 
deavor to survey and run the north and south 
lines, the east and west lines of our world-estate, 
we have to deal with magnitudes that leave us 



OUR INHERITANCE 23 

dazed — with billions, trillions, quintillions, nonil- 
lions — nonillions of miles in space and nonillions 
of worlds, countless suns and moons and planets, 
innumerable constellations and galaxies. It is a 
wonderful world, wonderful in its hugeness, won- 
derful in its eloquence, wonderful in its reticence, 
wonderful in its sublimity, wonderful in its al- 
lurement and wonderful in its elusiveness, grow- 
ing with our growth and unfolding in an ever- 
augmenting majesty and mystery with every en- 
largement of our vision and every advancement 
of our understanding. 

This world, so enormous in its dimensions, with 
horizons receding at every point of approach into 
the Infinite, is, in every atom of it, in every de- 
tail and lineament of it, the habitation of fathom- 
less, yet most entrancing, mysteries — the myster- 
ies of origin and process and destiny ; the mysteries 
of affinity and repulsion, of cohesion and disper- 
sion, of love and hate, of harmony and discord, of 
good and evil, of life and death. The least atom 
contains a philosophy of being that has baffled the 
metaphysic of all the ages. The most modest 
flower — the buttercup of the meadows; the prim- 
rose, resting softly in its bed of moss at the foot 



24 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of the oak tree ; the daisy that you will find in your 
walks through the fields on a summer's day — con- 
centrates within the deep, still heart of it an en- 
cyclopaedia of culture, a university of the sciences 
and the arts — the science of being, the science of 
creation, the science of morphology, the science of 
life; and the arts of form and of color; and that 
which is the consummation of all the sciences and 
all the arts, the science and the art of divinity. 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower, but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

That is true! The flower in the crannied wall 
holds in the inmost recess of its being a philosophy 
of the cosmos. 

The world is a progressive series of interroga- 
tions. Every problem solved is an open door lead- 
ing toward a mansion of more intricate problems. 
The problem of the atom touches the problem of a 
planet, and the problem of a planet opens the way 
into the problem of the universe. There is no 
resting place for the mind in all the vast scheme 



OUR INHERITANCE 25 

and enterprise of the world — no elevation, how- 
ever high, where the spirit can stand erect and 
affirm its mastery of being and of life. How- 
ever rich may be the treasures of wisdom we ac- 
quire as we journey along the highways of cul- 
ture, we are, mercifully, never bereft of the es- 
sence of all pleasure, the passion of pursuit. 
"Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto 
night showeth knowledge." Every extension of 
vision reveals a finer glory in the world. "Lift 
up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye 
everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall 
come in." This is the cry of the Eternal Psalm- 
ist to your soul. He bids you lift up the gates 
of your intellect, of your imagination, of your 
emotions, of your passions, that He, the King of 
Glory — the glory of sun and moon and star; the 
glory of heaven and earth; the glory of sky and 
sea and meadow; the glory of the trees and the 
flowers, the hills and the glens; the glory of sight 
and of sound, of sunshine and of symphony— may 
enter into your spirit and make you great with His 
greatness, glad with His gladness and beautiful 
with His beauty. 

What an offense it is against the dignity and 



26 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the prerogative of the soul to incarcerate our- 
selves in an illusion of poverty when we are afflu- 
ent with a cosmic plenitude of wealth ! And how 
malignant is that perversity which causes us, 
habitually, to murmur over the continuance of the 
night when all we have to do is to open our eyes 
to live in the full and radiant bounty of the zenith 
sun! All poverty is an illusion, except the pov- 
erty of the sealed vision and the immured talent. 
The great essential wealth — the wealth of health, 
the wealth of life, the wealth of high spirits, the 
wealth of beauty, the wealth of sweet and ex- 
quisite sensations, the wealth of love — is nobly 
impartial. The primitive and indispensable bless- 
ings constitute a divine democracy. 

The first lesson we all must learn in the mystical 
art of happiness is to enter into this inheritance of 
world-possession that no man can take from us. 
The whole world is ours for the seeking, the will- 
ing, the seeing and the taking. The beatitude of 
health is subject to the poor man's will more cer- 
tainly than it is at the command of the rich man's 
check book. The priceless treasures of Nature — 
the fresh, green fields of the springtime; the trees, 
robed in their delicate finery of snow on a winter's 



OUR INHERITANCE 27 

day ; the surge, the beat and the swell of the ocean ; 
the music and the murmur, the joy and the pas- 
sion of the world of life; the sweetness and the 
aroma of the rose ; the fragile and exquisite grace of 
the lily; the solemn splendor of the setting sun; the 
chatter, the anthems, the sonatas, the nocturnes, 
the harmonies of winged things; the wonder, 
the mystery, the charm of flower, bird and cloud, 
that have glorified the poet's eye and flooded his 
heart with incommunicable delight — these treas- 
ures that constitute the real opulence and triumph 
of life are not the peculiar and exclusive posses- 
sion of the rich and the mighty and the learned; 
they belong to all who are inspired with the pas- 
sion of life, to all who are coerced with a divine 
avarice for beauty. The great things carry with 
them, wherever they go, their own credentials. 
They need neither savant, nor critic, nor poet, nor 
painter, nor commentator to explain their worth 
and to lay bare their glory. The vision splendid 
and "the music of the spheres" respond not to him 
who is expert in the laws of light, or the science 
of sound, but to him — whether he be prince or 
peasant, prophet or shepherd, poet or plowman 
— who is endowed with the seeing eye and the 



28 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

hearing ear. The skylark sings not to the orni- 
thologist, but to man. And the charm and fra- 
grance of the violet may be more the possession of a 
sensitive child than of the savant learned to the 
last word of science in the mysteries of the flora 
of this planet. God has put a marvelous inheri- 
tance at the common man's disposal, at the com- 
mand of the man of the single talent. But, alas ! 
most of us prefer to abide in poverty — a pitiful 
poverty of sensation, of imagination, of culture, 
of experience, of joy, of life — in the midst of all 
this world-treasure, because, by some curse of 
original sin, we would rather gather pebbles along 
the wayside than consort with stars in the heavens. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 

Every man carries deep within him, at the core 
and center of his being, the secret of felicity and 
the mastery of destiny. The imperial force of 
life is the spirit, the self in us. It gives to the 
transient day its tone and value, and to the total- 
ity of experience its complexion and worth. The 
self, in a very real sense, is the artificer of its own 
world. The universe for every man radiates from 
his own soul as a center, and it assumes the char- 
acter and the dimensions of the soul from which it 
radiates. 

Life varies in value, in desirability, in the ardor 
and the cogency of its appeal, from day to day, 
from year to year, from decade to decade, accord- 
ing to the exaltation or depression of this interior 
mystery we call the self. The ray of light that 
comes leaping to the eye from the palpitating heart 
of the topaz may bring its luminosity from the 

29 



30 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

sun, but it takes its quality and the warmth of its 
color from the structure of the eye and the re- 
sponsiveness of its vision. 

When vitality is normal, the world is an equipol- 
lence of opposing forces and tendencies, and life 
is a mild sanity, equally unmenaced by a dismal 
pessimism or an exaggerated optimism. When 
vitality is low, the world becomes enrobed in 
shadows. It was in the subnormal region whose 
sky is dominantly austere and somber in which 
Amiel lived and thought and wrote. His pensive- 
ness, his disillusionment, his controversial attitude 
toward the angular decrees of circumstance and 
the unpleasant pressures of destiny, his soft and 
almost feminine resentments of the rough, familiar 
touch of the time-spirit as it passed by him, all the 
mild depression, the habitual grayness of tone that 
constitute at once the charm and the sterility of 
the pensee of Amiel have their origin, not in the 
actualities of the world that lies beyond experi- 
ence, but in an inherent subnormality of spirit. 
The ego in Amiel was deficient in the push and 
glow of life, in positiveness of impact, in the 
splendid affirmativeness that is a condition of 
perfect health in thought and conduct. The 



THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 31 

world was too much with him. It dominated and 
oppressed him and bore him down to the most 
bitter of all defeats, the defeat of an invincible 
despair. He was crushed under the weary burden 
of this rough and stalwart world, as one has seen 
a skilled wrestler, clean of limb, taut and stout 
and fine of thew, borne to the ground by the sheer 
strength of muscle and the insupportable weight 
of his opponent. 

When, however, we meet the pressure of the 
world and the issues of life with an ego that is 
supernormal in vitality, with an ego that is lam- 
bent with faith, radiant with the glow of health 
and actuated with a resistless energy of will, then, 
by some subtle magic, some divine wizardry of the 
spirit, we construe the world in our own image. 
We see it and its problems, its struggles, its trials 
and its obstacles, couleur de rose. Its resistances 
become for us a force of evocation, of culture, of 
self-realization. The minor consciousness of the 
burden of life is submerged and engulfed in the 
major consciousness of its greatness, its sweetness, 
its delight. 

It is in the power of each one of us, by the aid 
of a fine, autocratic self-consciousness, supple- 



32 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

merited by an imperious and insistent will — 
whether we live in palace or in prison, in mansion 
or in hovel, robed in the ermine of royalty, or 
clothed in the fustian of the artisan, amid circum- 
stances amiable or adverse — to woo and make our 
personal possession this supernormal energy, this 
elan vital of the spirit, this push and verve of the 
soul, whose miraculous function is to construe the 
dissonances and discords of life into a song of 
victory, to educe from "every loss a gain to match," 
to evoke the whiteness of the lily from the black 
earth in which it grows, to nourish joy at the 
breast of sorrow, and to turn the gloom of the 
night into the gladness of the day. 

We are not fated by the parsimony of oppor- 
tunity and the ill-nature of circumstance to cast 
our lot with the invertebrates, the derelicts, the in- 
effectives, the "sour-complected" hosts of failure 
overmastered by the harsh usage of the world. 
By the might and majesty of the God-inspired 
soul in us, we belong with the immortals, and we 
should dwell on the heights far beyond Parnas- 
sus, the abode of Homer and iEschylus and Shake- 
speare and Keats; far beyond Mount Zion, the 
abode of Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the 



THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 33 

Psalmist; we should dwell with the Man of Gali- 
lee, with St. Paul, with St. Francis of Assisi, with 
St. John of the Cross, with Fenelon, with Francis 
de Sales, on the Mount of Transfiguration, from 
whose heights, through eyes illumined with celes- 
tial light, we may behold the world palpitating 
with a divine beauty and the drama of life moving, 
under the compulsion of an infinite wisdom, to- 
ward a finale beautiful beyond our fairest dreams. 

It is not my purpose, nor my wish, in these ut- 
terances, to imprison life in an idealism that ig- 
nores the actuality of the world external to con- 
sciousness and that negates with a blind and bland 
audacity the deliverances of our sense impressions. 
The world is very real to me — real in its material 
stuff, real in its physical outlines, real in its beauty, 
real in its strife and struggle, real in its culture, 
real in its illiteracy, real in its joy, real in its 
grief, real in the mystery we call "life" and real 
also in the mystery we name "death." 

When the facile metaphysician, whether he be 
of the cult of Christian Science or an exponent of 
that rather vague institution known as The New 
Thought, tells me that matter is an illusion— that 
it has no existence beyond the circumference of 



34 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

thought — he does not leave me convinced; he 
leaves me chilled and wondering what may be the 
peculiar lesion in his thought processes. When 
he tells me that pain is a subjective malady having 
its origin and existence in the mortal mind — that 
it has no root in matter, because matter is non- 
existent; that it has no habitation in the nerves, 
because nerves have no reality outside of thought 
— he does not win me over to his factitious op- 
timisms; he, rather, adds one more enigma to the 
burden of my spirit. The obliquity of his 
metaphysic is, to me, a deeper shadow upon the 
perfection of the universe than the irregularities 
of our bodies and the perversities of our nerves. 
When, rising yet higher into the sublimated up- 
per kingdoms of his nebulous philosophy, he tells 
me that the last enemy, Death, is likewise a fiction 
of the mind, a disordered dream, a mere appear- 
ance, an illusion of the senses, the most unreal of 
all unrealities, his euphemisms not only affront 
my intelligence; they disturb my faith in the fair 
dealing of the Eternal. 

It is vastly to be preferred that man should con- 
tend with the dark and forbidding antagonists, 
Poverty and Pain and Sorrow and Death, than 



THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 35 

that he should be shut up in a scheme of things 
that has its impulse in the unveracity of the In- 
finite and its continuance in a cosmic diplomacy 
that conceals the form of a Satan under the gar- 
ments of an Angel of Light. Sorrow as a reality 
is, no doubt, bitter; but it has its own dignity and 
a noble function to accomplish in the divine econ- 
omy. But sorrow as an illusion is not a mitiga- 
tion; it is an insult — an insult to the mind, an 
insult to the heart — for it turns the strenuous, 
austere drama of life into a smug and smiling 
farce. Death as a reality is tragical ; yet it moves 
in our midst with august mien; and it carries in 
its shadowed hands countless blessings invisible 
through the veil of our tears, but which time and 
reflection will bring into perfect clarity. How- 
ever, death as an illusion, an appearance, a sham 
— all its remoteness, its reticence, its immobility, 
its unresponsiveness to the pathetic wailings of the 
heart crushed and desolated, all the trappings, the 
lesions, the woes of death, illusion! This is not 
philosophy ! It is irony in its most cruel, its most 
taunting form. It amazes me that any one can 
be willing to buy peace of heart at a cost that in- 
volves a double outrage, an outrage to our reason 



36 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

and an outrage to our love. The world would be 
bereft of much of its charm and would lose vastly 
in sublimity as an institution of discipline and 
culture if we should deny it external being, if by 
our soft and nerveless philosophies we should re- 
fine its substance into non-existence and trans- 
form its warm and vivid actualities into the pale 
"stuff of which dreams are made." 

For us — at least in our present state and form 
of consciousness — the universe is a dualism. It 
cannot by any audacity of logic be compressed into 
unity, whether it be a unity of matter or a unity 
of spirit. The world, for the man of unsophis- 
ticated intelligence, is a composite of spirit and 
matter, of the conscious self and the great outer 
world that presses upon and nourishes the self in 
him with all its myriad ministries of life and truth 
and beauty and love. However fantastical our 
thinking may be, however intense our passion to 
discover a unity of being, that can find no perma- 
nent lodgment in the human mind under its present 
limitations of thought, two worlds always con- 
front us — the inner world of the soul, the spirit, 
the personality, and the vast, vague, obtrusive 
world that lies beyond the periphery of self, and 



THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 37 

which is ever striving to enrich the self with its 
infinity of content, with its obvious facts and its 
hidden wisdom, with its lights and its shadows, 
its smiles and its tears, its joys and its sorrows, its 
suavities and its asperities, its coronations and its 
crosses, and which the self in us is ever striving to 
master, to find the rational order in its apparent 
disorder and the ultimate meaning that lies en- 
tombed in the deeps of its present confusions. No 
matter with what subtlety we spiritualize our 
metaphysic, our religion, our philosophy of life 
and conduct, the great external world — with its 
suns and planets; its mountains, valleys, streams 
and oceans ; its rocks, trees and flowers ; its bound- 
less wealth of living, sentient creatures; its mys- 
teries of suffering, love and self-consciousness; its 
Epiphanies, Gethsemanes, Golgothas and Ascen- 
sions — remains a permanency of thought and also 
a permanency beyond thought. 

It is a vast and intricate world, this outer world 
of matter and of circumstance. And yet, with 
all its vastness and intricacy, it is subject to the 
sovereignty of the spirit, to the magical authority 
of personality. The world is, to the creative spirit 
of man, what the marble is to the sculptor. The 



38 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

sculptor must subdue the marble to the expression 
of the ideal form which he has fashioned out of 
the ethereal substance of his dreams. In like man- 
ner, the spirit of man, instinct with a divine mas- 
terfulness, must transmute the concealments, the 
resistances, the obduracies of the world-stuff into 
vision, into character, into beauty, into an ever- 
increasing fullness and richness of personality. 

We marvel at the wonderful works wrought by 
the Jesus of history. We read of His walking on 
the sea of Gennesaret, His turning water into wine 
on the occasion of the marriage feast at Cana in 
Galilee, His giving sight to the blind, and the 
wondrous transfiguration upon the mount ; and we 
shake our heads and say, "This is not history; it is 
legend. This is not fact; it is a beautiful, tender 
fiction, woven out of the adoring, though uncrit- 
ical, imagination of primitive Chris tianity." Yet 
every man — the lowest as certainly as the highest ; 
the most illiterate as surely as the most learned — 
carries within his spirit a miracle more wonderful 
than any marvel recorded in the New Testament. 
He carries within him the miracle of miracles, the 
miracle that is the fecund source and the mighty 



THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 39 

dynamic of all lesser miracles, the miracle that 
brings man into conjunction with the exhaustless 
power of God and that makes him master of the 
world, the miracle of the will. The will is the 
man. It is the power of divinization ; it is the 
God in him. "Whosoever will, let him take of the 
water of life freely." This utterance of the high- 
est wisdom from the Book of Revelation, by St. 
John the Divine, is an appeal to our dignity, our 
nobility, our heroism. He does not say "whoso- 
ever thinks," "whosoever desires," "whosoever 
feels," "whosoever dreams," but "whosoever wills, 
let him drink of the water of life freely." This 
is the logic of our incarnation. This is why our 
spirit is inwrought with all the problems, the mar- 
vels, the secrecies, the obscurities of this planet 
earth. We are put here — not by any accident, 
not by any caprice or whim of the world-process, 
but by an austere wisdom that is infallible in all its 
decrees and impeccable in all its methods — that 
we may drink of the water of life. The end of 
life is not the accumulation of great wealth; it is 
not transient, perishable honor; it is not fitful and 
insubstantial fame; it is not treacherous and ca- 



40 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

prieious renown: the end of life is life — the life 
abundant; life, strong, full-orbed, stately, sensi- 
tive, fine. 

The one stupendous duty that devolves upon 
every man — the duty that takes up into itself and 
gives a meaning to every other duty, as the light 
takes up into itself and gives a meaning to the 
beauty that lurks in the depths of the emerald or 
the sapphire — is the will to live. The will of man 
is the most lordly thing in all this universe. It 
is the incarnate God in us. It is the logos, the 
eternal word, in us. It is the Christ in us — the 
Christ who creates and uncreates, who forms and 
unforms, who strives and wrestles and conquers 
and rules and reigns, and at whose feet all the 
world, and the glory of it, lies subject. By the 
magic of the will, we may turn every cross into a 
blessing — poverty into opulence, resistance into 
power, weakness into strength, defeat into victory, 
sin into holiness, hate into love, doubt into vision, 
sorrow into gladness and the mystery of death into 
the mystery of eternal life. 

We cannot, by any strategy of the intellect, by 
any legerdemain of syllogism, eliminate poverty 
and evil and suffering from the scheme of things. 



THE MAGIC OF THE SPIRIT 41 

They are there, whether we admit or deny their 
presence; and we must meet with and confront 
them, however poignant may be our aversion, how- 
ever bitter our hostility, however keen our dislike. 
But it is our prerogative; it is our glory, by the 
power and artifice of the will, to transcend them, 
to utilize them in the attainment of our ideals, to 
transform them into beatitudes, to rise upon these 
rungs of trial and infelicity toward higher things 
and to create out of their dark substance, though 
as by fire, the crown of life — the one crown that 
symbolizes a complete and indisputable victory. 



CHAPTER V 



PERSONALITY 



If a man be the creator of his own kingdom 
and the artificer of his own destiny, if the wealth 
of well-being depend upon the wealth of con- 
sciousness and the content of experience, how im- 
portant a matter is the culture and the enrich- 
ment of personality ! Life is the offspring of the 
marriage of personality with the world. If we 
woo the world with our senses alert and hospitable, 
with our passions and emotions at the flood, with 
open arms, with open eyes, with open minds, with 
open hearts, the world will respond to us, fullness 
for fullness, passion for passion, love for love. 
If, on the other hand, we bring to the world a 
personality that is inert, slender and insensitive, 
the nuptials will be a failure; for though the 
world's dot is large and as rich as infinity, the 
treasure at our command is just the amount of 
treasure we can grasp and the kind of treasure we 

can appreciate. The world-spirit is exquisitely 

42 



PERSONALITY 43 

responsive, but it is also punctiliously just. It 
responds to our appeals, not according to our 
wishes, nor even according to the measure of our 
needs, but according to our capacities and inten- 
sities. Pearls are not found on the seashore by 
the idle saunterer. They are the reward of the 
skilled diver, who has learned, through long and 
systematic training, to master the ocean deeps in 
which they find their habitation. Nature is al- 
ways in scrupulous alignment with our forces. 
The equations she metes out at the behest of our 
talents and abilities are unimpeachable in their 
exactitude and equity. A diamond in the hand 
of a savage has no greater value than a bit of 
crystal of equal bulk, because the savage cannot 
differentiate, either through physical vision or 
economic intuition, the diamond from the crystal. 
The sunset is merely a gorgeous pastel of vast 
surface to the imagination that goes upon its feet, 
that is terrene in its structure and affinities ; while 
to the imagination that soars, whose native element 
is the spacious, pellucid sky, the sunset is an 
apocalypse, an infallible system of divinity. 

Primitive Israel feasts his sight upon the crude 
might and majesty of the world. The barbaric 



44 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

instinct in him responds in fear, or in awe, to the 
lightning's crash, to the thunder's ominous roar, to 
the rush and the rage of the winds, to the wrath 
and the violence of the clouds; and he prostrates 
his spirit, yet unsoftened by the mild, sweet in- 
fluences of earth and sky, before El Shaddai, the 
god of might, a sort of Hebraic Vulcan, the forger 
of lightnings, the lord of storms, the breeder of 
woes and pestilence, the god of the frogs and the 
fleas and the lice that afflicted Egypt and brought 
disaster upon the dynasty of the Pharaohs. Cen- 
turies come and go — centuries fraught with strug- 
gle, with pain, with the sorrow of national humilia- 
tion; centuries of culture under the illuminating 
and enlarging touch of Time; centuries of medita- 
tion upon the sweet, tender, yearning loveliness of 
the Psalmist, upon the heroic, the far-resounding, 
the sublime eloquence of Isaiah, upon the burning 
denunciations, the valiant optimisms, the high, 
mystical visions of Ezekiel and Jeremiah and all 
the mighty hierarchy of the prophets — and then 
barbaric Israel dies in giving birth to the climac- 
teric man, the sovereign prophet, the master of 
mankind, who envisaged the world through eyes 
large with the vision of the Eternal and chastened 



PERSONALITY 45 

and softened by the mild love of His wonderful 
heart, so that wherever he looked — whether upon 
the sea or the meadows, upon the lilies or the 
sheep in the fold, upon the sky flooded with the 
light of the sun or overcast with clouds, upon the 
waving corn growing in the field or the bird on the 
wing; upon the Pharisee, blameless in the law, 
worshiping in the temple, or the prodigal, re- 
deemed by the bitter disillusionments of sin, wend- 
ing his weary way home — he beheld the token and 
the sign of the Father, of the eternal heart, of a 
love whose bounty is inexhaustible, whose pa- 
tience never wearies and whose mercy reaches unto 
and beyond, far beyond, the uttermost and direst 
needs of His children. 

Man is made in the image of God, and just as 
God creates and ceaselessly recreates the macro- 
cosm, so every soul creates and ceaselessly recreates 
its microcosm, its lesser, individual, personal world, 
in which it must live and move and have its be- 
ing, for weal or woe. The universe is a glorious 
indefiniteness in its quantity, its compass and its 
quality. It is infinitely elastic and variable, con- 
tracting and expanding with the systolic and 
diastolic movements of our personality. Its mag- 



46 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

nitude is the magnitude of our spirit. Its splendor 
is the splendor of our vision. Its interestingness 
is measured by the interestingness of our thoughts 
and our emotions. Its beauty is determined by 
the fineness and the richness of the rhythms of our 
touch, our hearing, our sight. Its wonder and 
its charm are centered in the wonder and the charm 
of the eye that beholds them. Its God is as God- 
like as the Godlikeness of our faith, our actions and 
our prayers. We make and unmake creeds and 
liturgies and deities as we make and unmake styles 
in furniture or clothes, as we make and unmake 
social customs, laws, conventions, manners, modes 
of literature and styles in art. A creed is a con- 
cretion of a soul in an aphorism or a phrase. God, 
though in Himself a permanence of perfection, is, 
in relationship to man, an unstable equilibrium. 
He is susceptible of change, of progress, of devel- 
opment. We begin life with the image of a con- 
crete God in our hearts — the patriarchal, parochial 
God who comes easily within the compass of the 
mental and emotional processes of childhood. 
When the shadows begin to lengthen and deepen, 
the Eternal loses its definiteness and we can no 
longer give it "a local habitation and a name." 



PERSONALITY 47 

It resolves itself into a noble vagueness, a form- 
less essence, a mystery of light and love and 
beauty. 

When one reflects upon the august, creative 
power of personality — the power to impoverish or 
enrich, to enlarge or curtail, to magnify or dwarf, 
to ennoble or stultify the sphere in which it lives 
and realizes its destiny, a destiny of servitude or 
kingship — one cannot but wonder why this master 
force of life and happiness is not the one ultimate 
and supreme objective of all academic culture and 
discipline. We train the hand, the eye, the ear, 
the nerves, the muscles to the point of efficiency 
and expertness in the accomplishment of given 
tasks. We train the mind to observe, to think, to 
concentrate, to remember, to reason. We train, 
educe and virilize the faculties that will make us 
able and facile in the performance of special func- 
tions — the function of a carpenter, an engineer, an 
accountant, a merchant, a teacher, a physicist, a 
chemist, a biologist, a doctor, a lawyer, a clergy- 
man. We graduate from our schools, colleges, 
post-graduate institutions, units of efficiency, 
specialists, men who, by the compression of their 
interests and the precision of their talents, "make 



48 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

good," to use one of the most detestable phrases 
of this very commercial age. The economic mech- 
anism turns out a more than satisfactory product 
in the way of formulated aptitudes. We have 
energy, speed, accuracy, cleverness — men who are 
skilled from Alpha to Omega in buying and sell- 
ing, in tearing down and building up; expert 
brokers, bankers, lawyers, traders, journalists, poli- 
ticians, reformers, orators, professors, theologians, 
preachers. Modern culture, modern business, 
modern life, is all point and focus. Our civiliza- 
tion is distressingly fractional. We form a vast 
constituency of economic fragments — efficient, 
dynamic fragments, but still fragments. 

Personality, that marvelous conjunction of 
force, vision, symmetry, culture, refinement, dis- 
tinction — that fine conspiracy of body, mind, heart 
and spirit, of strength and sweetness, of vivacity 
and repose, of authority and humility in an entire, 
a masterful manhood — is a phenomenon as rare 
and infrequent in the communal life of our mod- 
ern world as are the stars of impressive magnitude 
in the heavens. Wide spaces separate royal and 
distinguished personalities from each other, as wide 
spaces separate the trees of imposing grandeur in 



PERSONALITY 49 

the forest. "Mediocrity" is graven in coarse, bold 
lines all over the features of modernity. We 
sum up our time, its ambitions, its ideals, its tastes, 
its journalism, its drama, its literature, its man- 
ners, its canons of success, its standards of worth 
and ability, its citizenship, with sporadic excep- 
tions, in this pathetic word, pregnant with crit- 
icism and with failure — mediocrity. "The age 
of chivalry is past," and the age of the grand style 
is vanished. As though conscious of and valiantly 
protesting against this sad submergence of per- 
sonality, we strive with heroic energy to con- 
ceal the poverty and inefficacy of our spirits un- 
der costliness of attire, the hauteur of riches, the 
swagger born of self-distrust, the infantile his- 
trionics of the poseur and the empty theatricality 
of our exotic manners. We labor with an ardor 
worthy of a nobler eventuality to hide our dwarfed 
figure from the scrutiny of the world by the smart- 
ness of our strut and the thin veneer of good 
form. The inevitable logic of all this concentra- 
tion of the royal treasures of the spirit in a spe- 
cial faculty, a special task, a special prosperity, is 
ennui, restlessness, disillusionment, cynicism and 
failure in its largest and most bitter form. 



50 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Our age is superb in its enterprise and magnifi- 
cent in its physical prowess. It is powerful, in- 
tellectual, inventive, splendidly adequate to all 
things mundane and lavishly gifted in all the utili- 
tarian arts. But with all its subtlety of genius 
and its vaunted practicality, it has not learned that 
the accomplishment of highest worth is the ac- 
complishment of personality. It has achieved 
material wealth, physical prosperity, political 
democracy, industrial prestige, economic efficiency ; 
but it will not enter into the full measure of the 
dignity, the opulence and the splendor of its larger 
inheritance until it goes one step further, until it 
learns to honor, to reverence and to achieve per- 
sonality. Personality is the mystic wand that 
transmutes the raw material of our possessions and 
the neutral ministries of the world into the mys- 
tical treasure of life and vision and felicity. The 
man who is affluent in the power, the appropria- 
tiveness and the grace of personality is the only 
man who is rich with the riches that ennoble, adorn 
and bless. However victorious a man may appear 
to others by virtue of the magnitude of his external 
possessions, he is to himself never greater than 
the compass and orbit of his own soul. 



CHAPTER VI 

A NEXUS OF THE TALENTS 

A friend was very insistent that Thomas Er- 
skine of Linlathen, Scotland — a lay theologian, 
who, by the largeness of his faith and the beauty of 
his character, has had a marked and most salutary 
influence upon the development of thought within 
the modern church, both in Great Britain and in 
America — should accompany him to worship one 
Sunday morning in order that he might hear a 
young clergyman who had recently been installed 
in the parish church, and in whose eloquence and 
ministry he found keen delight. The divine, yet 
in the salad days of his ministry, was earnest, 
fervent and rhetorical in his manner, and the 
sermon was delivered with verve and a fine aban- 
don, though somewhat rambling in its structure 
and inconclusive in its logic. On the way home, 
Erskine was silent, making comment neither on 
the worship nor the part the young master in Israel 

51 



52 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

had taken in it. The friend, consumed with a 
desire to know what Erskine's estimate of the 
sermon might be, ventured to invade the privacy 
of his thoughts, saying: "And how did you like 
the sermon, Mr. Erskine^" "It was quite earn- 
est, Sir," replied Mr. Erskine — "quite earnest, but 
not after the perfect manner of a sermon; for, 
you know, one desiderates a nexus." 

There is a whole criticism of life in this ad- 
mirable aphorism of four words. One desiderates 
a nexus, a point of connection, a center of cohesion. 
The nexus is a sine qua non of mass, of force, of 
beauty, of felicity. A planet is a planet because 
of the nexus of its atoms. The rose is a rose be- 
cause of the nexus of its molecules, and it is the 
Killarney or the American Beauty because of the 
cohesion of the peculiar molecules that enter into 
the constitution of its fragrance and its loveliness. 
A building, a house, an art institute, a church is 
architecturally noble and impressive, a delight to 
the eye, through the cohesion of its details, its 
composition and its color scheme. Great litera- 
ture, as well as great architecture, must be endowed 
with this indispensable virtue of the nexus. The 
Iliad is magnificent, not merely by the charm of 



A NEXUS OF THE TALENTS 53 

its isolated glories, but, rather, by the cumulative 
impact upon the imagination of its continuous 
theme. The Bible finds our emotions because of 
the elevation and the sweep of its spiritual appeal, 
because of the majesty of its revelation and the 
haunting beauty of its style ; but it commands our 
intellect because it is superbly organic, all its 
parts, though variant in form and in value, coher- 
ing in the most epical of all motives, the motive 
of a divine humanity, of an incarnate God, 
whether the incarnation be crude and partial, as in 
Abraham, the aboriginal monotheist, in Elijah, the 
dark-browed prophet of wrath and denunciation, 
or complete and consummated, as in the Jesus of 
history. 

If, however, cohesion be an imperious law of 
stability and grace in a flower, in architecture, in 
literature, not less is it an imperious law of mas- 
tery and well-being in the region of personality. 
If we would use our talents to the highest ad- 
vantage, we must bring them into concord, into 
coalition ; we must bring them into unity, into an 
amicable conjunction in a common center. The 
elements that constitute personality should not 
run parallel the one to the other, or along tend- 



54 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

encies divergent from one another. They should 
coalesce in us, as do the prismatic colors in the 
perfect ray of light. They should so mix in us 
that all the world may rise up and say, "There 
is a man." 

It is strange how obtuse our vision is in regard 
to all things customary and habitual. We do 
not value with a sufficient appreciation our com- 
mon blessings, nor do we regard with a sufficient 
dread the ills with which we have frequent and 
familiar contact. It is not until our sight is dis- 
turbed that we realize the wondrous graciousness 
and sweetness of the light of common day. We 
use every safeguard against the virulence of an 
occasional epidemic — an epidemic of typhus or 
yellow fever that may, for a brief season, menace 
our neighborhood — but we are indifferent to the 
far more insidious epidemic of the common cold, 
which never visits us without robbing us of some 
portion of the treasure of our vitality, and which 
never leaves us without carrying off in its stealthy 
hands some measure of our resiliency. We visit 
upon the vice of theft the penalty of social os- 
tracism and an austerity of judgment absurdly out 
of proportion to the inconvenience suffered by the 



A NEXUS OF THE TALENTS 55 

victim, because theft is intermittent and excep- 
tional. But the diminishing word, that may be 
in its consequences inexpressibly more injurious 
than the pilfering of gold or of jewels, involves 
not even the just retribution of social indignation, 
because the vice of the diminishing word is a vice 
of such wide and general distribution as to be un- 
important and negligible. It is by reason of this 
tendency in us to miss the emphasis and the sig- 
nificance of the habitual presence, whether it be 
of strength or weakness, that we entirely ignore, 
in our studies of the pathology of the spirit, its 
most insidious and erosive malady, the malady 
of the lesion of personality, the divorcement of the 
faculties that work in health and effectiveness only 
when they work in unity and cooperation. 

The masses of mankind utterly fail to convert 
the great and abounding potentials of well-being 
and happiness into the rewards of a large and 
beautiful experience. Poverty is the rule ; wealth 
is the exception. Ignorance is the rule; illumina- 
tion is the exception. The routine of the task is 
the rule; the inspiration of the task is the excep- 
tion. Vulgarity is the rule; refinement is the 
exception. Ugliness — ugliness of ideals, of tastes, 



56 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of circumstances, of morals, of beliefs — is the rule ; 
beauty is, everywhere and in all things, the excep- 
tion — the rare exception. Life for the multitude 
is a pathetic mendicancy. We are chiefly rich 
in the possessions we do not wish, and which are 
thrust upon us without our seeking and against 
our will — struggle, strain, neurosis, impecunious- 
ness, insufficiency, the humiliation of failure, the 
melancholy of success. 

This anaemia of life has not its cause and ex- 
planation, as many think, in the superficial, obvi- 
ous faults of temperament, or in the ruthless in- 
dividualism of modern economics. The Goddess 
of Bounty, who distributes the rewards due to 
effort and competency, is punctiliously impartial 
and democratic. The mines, the forests, the lakes, 
the seas, the earth, the air, the industries, the 
banks, the professions are open to all alike, and on 
equal terms. If it be true that "unto him that 
hath more shall be given," it is no less true that 
the rewards of Fortune wait not upon favor, but 
upon mastery and performance. The major por- 
tion of humanity is not living in strain and ten- 
sion, in confusion and discomfort, in insufficiency 
and impecuniosity because of the favoritism or 



A NEXUS OF THE TALENTS 57 

the parsimoniousness of the world-spirit. The 
world-spirit is perfectly fair. It can only bestow 
upon us its blessings, its wealth, its truth, its 
beauty, its life, its love, its gayety, its serenity of 
mind and of heart according to our power to be 
blessed. I think if you and I really want to know 
why it is that we cut such a poor and shabby 
figure, why we play so unheroic a part on the 
stage of life and in the drama of the world, all we 
have to do is to turn our eyes inward toward our- 
selves, and to look deeper than our surface faults, 
our indolences, our inertia of purpose, our disman- 
tling habits. We must look into the profundi- 
ties of our being. There we shall find the malady 
in whose slovenly abysses all our woe and gloom 
and incoherence have their origin and explanation 
— the malady of the schism of personality, the dis- 
junction of our forces, our faculties, our powers. 
"A house divided against itself cannot stand." A 
man who is rent with schisms at the center of his 
being, who is riven with the feuds and hostilities of 
forces that should be harmonious and cooperative, 
and in whom reason, emotion, passion, will, are in 
constant controversy and antagonism — that man 
is doomed to the failure and dethronement that 



58 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

await all organic lesions, whether they be lesions 
in state, in church, or in the individual soul. 

Life is superbly exhilarating, but it is also a 
stupendous problem. We cannot command its in- 
most meanings and its richest responses by going 
into battle with a segmental self, with body and 
spirit warring in separateness and disjunction, with 
the frigid edicts of conscience clashing with the 
ardors of the flesh, with the light of reason divorced 
from the passion of the heart. Man is not a 
body; he is not an intellect; he is not an emotion; 
he is not a conscience : he is the sum, the synthesis 
and the unity of all these various factors of his 
being. And if he wishes to be triumphant in the 
great battle whose sequent is the more abundant 
life, and whose reward is happiness, the joy and 
the delight of living, then he must go into the 
great controversy in all the splendid, invincible 
unity of his gifts — an entire personality, a whole 
and spherical man. 

When we study the distinguished and mighty 
masters of men we always find that it is just this 
virtue of the nexus, of a complete and concordant 
unity of personality, that is the common denom- 
inator of their power and magistracy. The secret 



A NEXUS OF THE TALENTS 59 

of the greatness of Bismarck was the entire con- 
secration of his stalwart, though cynical, talents, 
in all the cohesion of a commanding and imperious 
personality, to the cause of Germanic unity and 
the world-regency of Teutonic ideals. The secret 
of the final victory of Wagner over the sterile 
traditions of the schools, the musical illiteracy of 
the world, the squalor of circumstances and the 
deadening pressure of debt, was the devotion of 
his noble gifts in a royal concord to achieve a 
marvelous fusion of the barbaric and the mystical, 
of the brute and the god, of the earth and the 
heavens, of mundane song and celestial symphony, 
in his massive and imposing music-dramas. 

The most amazing of all victories, the victory of 
the idealism, the transcendental ethics, the self- 
negation, the social promiscuity, the supernal love- 
liness of Jesus, a victory that emerged out of the 
very heart of humiliation and catastrophe — how 
shall we account for this miracle of history if we 
do not find its reason and its explanation in the 
splendid unity of the personality of this most 
masterful and alluring of all the spiritual prophets 
of humanity"? Thought, sensibility, emotion, will, 
wrought with divine amity in Him a lyric grace 



60 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of soul, a harmony of manhood, a perfect music 
of redemption. Jesus is not the one figure of soli- 
tary preeminence in history because of the superla- 
tive greatness of any particular talent, the singular 
luminosity of any specific power. He is not pre- 
eminent in the world of intellect. He is not pre- 
eminent in the world of action and organization. 
He is not preeminent in the sublime audacity of 
His courage, in the fealty of His spirit to the 
ideal unto its ultimate pains. Latimer gave up 
his life with a soul unblenched by fear. Socrates 
stepped into the World of the Unknown with the 
detachment and abandon of a god. The grandeur 
of Jesus is that all His faculties had their root, 
their nexus, in the Infinite. His talents were in 
accord; they were symphonic. His world- reign 
is the equation of a personality that finds its center 
and its unity in God. His beauty is the beauty 
of a finished synthesis of virtues and of powers. 
He is the most passionately loved man that ever 
lived, because of the unique wholeness and sym- 
metry of His spirit. And if we desire to taste the 
sweets of victory, to revel in the amplitudes of 
the larger prosperity and to exult in the joy of 
living, we must make the secret of Bismarck, of 



A NEXUS OF THE TALENTS 61 

Wagner, of all the masters of mankind, and su- 
premely the secret of the Jesus of history, our own. 
We must do as they did, live as they lived and 
work as they worked. We must not meet the 
world with fragmentary powers and dislocated 
faculties. We must not confront the Mighty Ad- 
versary with our personality in internecine strife. 
An imperative condition of victory, of the victory 
of life, is to establish an entente cordiale among 
the high, imperial powers that rule over the mystic 
kingdom of the soul. 



CHAPTER VII 

A FINE EGOTISM 

It is as impossible for a man to escape from 
his ego as it is for the body to escape from its 
shadow on a moonlight night, or for the sun to 
escape from the presence and dominion of its pho- 
tosphere. Wherever we go, we carry self with us. 
It is the one incontestably real presence — the Priest 
of Jehovah, or the Priest of Baal, who officiates, 
in full canonicals and with plenary authority, in 
all the rites, the functions and the processes of life. 
In every thought we think, in every deed that 
emanates from our will, in every aspiration that 
goes forth from us in prayer, the ego is present 
as the dynast of good or evil to canonize or to 
curse. The self is the one sovereign and pontifical 
force of sacrament or excommunication that dwells 
in the center of our being and gives its tone and 
quality to the essence and the mode of our 

thoughts, our emotions and our actions. 

62 



A FINE EGOTISM 63 

All men are egotists, just as all crows are black 
and all snow is white. Crows may differ in many 
ways — in structure, in size, in pugnacity — but they 
are always black. Flakes of snow may differ — 
differ in many ways, in weight, in moisture, in size, 
in conformation — but snow is always white. And 
men may differ — differ in countless ways, in phy- 
sique, in complexion, in racial characteristics, in 
national qualities, in quantity and quality of in- 
tellect, in warmth, color and reach of vision, in 
firmness and pressure of will, in ornateness, vivid- 
ness and reality of faith — but, saint or sinner, elect 
or canaille, aristocrat or plebeian, savant or peas- 
ant, they are all egotists. 

Hampden was an egotist in pitting his faith in 
a constitutional monarchy against the ideals and 
the traditions of the political absolutism of his 
country and his age. 

Lincoln was an egotist of the most pronounced 
type when he confronted his constituents, so gen- 
erally committed to the economic slavery of the 
negro, with his thesis, whose corollary was eman- 
cipation — "This country cannot survive half free 
and half slave." 

Buddha was an egotist when he gave up the 



64 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

luxury, the glamour and the influence of his 
princely patrimony to woo the absolute and to 
obtain peace of soul amid the silences and the 
shadows of the forest. Self was so central and 
mandatory in his philosophy of conduct, and in 
his theory of divinity, that he desocialized him- 
self in order to become one with the absolute 
through a progressive liturgy of self -denudation — 
the denudation of the external self of desire and 
change, in order that the inner, eternal self might 
enter into the permanent, the changeless tran- 
quillity of Nirvana. 

Jesus is the most stately and superb egotist, 
as He is the most august figure in all the vast can- 
vas of history. The egotism of Buddha is a poor, 
starved and negative excellence when measured 
against the robust, the monumental, the sublime 
egotism of the Man of Nazareth. The egotism 
of Jesus was insistent, affirmative, cosmic. Lis- 
ten to the audacity of His words, an audacity that 
compels the response of the love and reverence 
of our hearts because we know it is the audacity 
of a God who speaks through the lips of a man — 

"Take up your cross and follow me!" 

"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 



A FINE EGOTISM 65 

"I and the Father are one." 

"The Father worketh hitherto and I work." 

"I am the light of the world." 

"He that followeth me shall have the light of life." 

"I am the resurrection and the life." 

"The woman saith unto Him, 'I know that Messiah 
cometh that is called Christ. When He is come He will 
tell us all things.' Jesus saith unto her, 'I that speak 
unto thee am He.' " 

"Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden 
and I will give you rest." 

— What titanic egotism ! And yet it was this di- 
vine self -exaltation of Jesus that was the stay 
and the strength of His soul in all the crucial 
moments of His beautiful, but tragic, career. It 
sustained Him when He beheld, with a frequency 
of experience that must have been a bitterness 
to His ardent, sensitive nature, His light-laden, 
His love-burdened words spend themselves in vain 
upon the hardened, inhospitable spirit of the Is- 
rael of His day — an Israel ensepulchered in a 
ceremonial of death beyond the power of any res- 
urrection. It upheld Him through the dark con- 
sciousness of the desertion and the defeat, the 
desolation and the anguish of Gethsemane. It 
bore Him, in its strong and unreleasing grasp, 



66 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

undismayed by the fear of pain, the ignominy of 
failure, the obloquy and the scorn of men, to the 
great and final oblation, the tragedy of the cross, 
whose agony became His evangel, whose weak- 
ness became His strength, and whose shame be- 
came His glory and His coronation. Calvary is 
the apotheosis of egotism. The Jesus of Galilee 
was adequate to the stupendous task that devolved 
upon Him as the Savior of the world because 
of the divine self-consciousness that merged His 
spirit with the spirit of the Infinite in a unity that 
was as sublime in its perfect identity with the es- 
sence of the Eternal as it has been and is, and 
will continue to be, potent in the salvation of 
men. 

It is not to be wondered at that this high vir- 
tue of great souls should assume the aspect of 
a fault in lean and meager natures. The vanity 
of appearances, the pride of place, the supercil- 
iousness of intellectual culture, the strut of power, 
the ostentation of riches, the arrogance of opinion 
and the pomp of ancestry — these vulgar and irri- 
tating qualities, so obtrusive and of such prodigal 
distribution among the generality, are not the 
legitimate offspring of a noble and a fine self -con- 



A FINE EGOTISM 67 

sciousness. They are a bastard brood. They are 
the ill-featured progeny of a wretched mesalliance 
— the mesalliance of a mean soul with opulent 
fortune, or with imaginary talents. When we 
place the emphasis of superiority, not upon the 
worth and dignity of the spirit, but upon things ex- 
ternal — upon our estate, our fortune, our fashion, 
our social importance — we confront the world, not 
with the proud, impressive air that marks the man 
who lives in the stately consciousness of a royal 
self -valuation, but, rather, with the nervous and 
fumbling insecurity of manner that is the unmis- 
takable sign and confession of an inner self-de- 
preciation. The stress we lay upon our man- 
nerisms, our possessions, our dress, our obese and 
dazzling materialities, our social exclusiveness, 
our insouciance, our languid, yawning detachment 
from all emotions and enthusiasms, is not the ex- 
pression of egotism. It is the expression of a 
low vitality, of an impoverished imagination, of a 
deficient self-reverence. 

The passion of separateness, of distinction, is 
an innate endowment of every man. With the 
certainty of Fate, if he cannot arrest the atten- 
tion of the world by the magnitude and pressure 



68 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of personality, he will strive to lift himself into 
visibility through the external and accidental lev- 
erages of riches, fortune, or position. Now and 
again the great spirit, to realize more speedily its 
ambitions and its dreams, and to overcome ob- 
stacles that may be temporarily in its way, will 
avail itself of the blandishments that command 
the applause and the admiration of the medioc- 
rities through whom its goal must be reached. 
There is, however, in this unhappy process no 
confusion of values. Life is a battle in which 
the combatant must often make an immediate, 
provisional surrender of a position in order to ac- 
complish his objective — ultimate and uncondi- 
tioned victory. The ideal, if it would be opera- 
tive, must lose somewhat of its static luster, just 
as the vision of the sculptor loses somewhat of 
the chaste loveliness of the ideal through attri- 
tion with the rough surface of the marble out 
of whose substance it is being evoked by hammer 
and by chisel. There are situations where the 
world is a factor in the problem to be solved, in 
which egotism for the moment must adopt the 
ways of the world in order that it may the more 
certainly and the more speedily conquer the 



A FINE EGOTISM 69 

world and make it tributary to its own purpose 
and destiny. 

Disraeli, in many ways the most fascinating 
and impressive figure in the political Europe of 
the nineteenth century, was, in his early years, 
a poseur and a fop. But as soon as his genius 
came into its proper inheritance, the posing and 
the foppery — their purpose served — having been 
put aside, he dominated Great Britain and, in a 
large measure, the continental policies of Europe 
by the cogency and massiveness of his egotism. 
He reigned among the statesmen of his age a super- 
man, a superman of political sagacity and imperial 
enterprise. 

An ignoble self-love is the root of all evil. 
Conversely, a fine self-love is the root of all mas- 
tery, all princeliness and beauty of character, all 
enrichment of thought, all enlargement of free- 
dom, all victory and all beatitude. "Gnothi 
seauton!" "Know thyself!" — this is the com- 
mandment of promise of the Delphic oracle. 
"Take heed unto thyself!" — this is the ultimate 
wisdom of one of the most energic spirits and 
masterful minds of Israel. "Love thy neighbor 
as thyself!" — this is the final edict of the Deca- 



7 o EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

logue, formulated by the greatest legislator that 
ever lived, by the headmaster of righteousness, 
by the king whose territorial possessions are 
bounded, not by mountain ranges, nor by oceans, 
nor by continents, but by the circumference of the 
planet and the furthest outposts of mankind. 

The mathematical and unfailing equation of 
a high and critical self-valuation is power and 
dominion. The drive, the urge, which is of the 
essence of sovereignty, whatever may be the do- 
main in which the talent operates, has its singu- 
lar impulse and sustenance in the triune virtue — 
self-knowledge: self-reverence: self-control. We 
strike with vigor only when we are confident that 
the stroke will go to its mark. The talent whose 
virile dynamic is self-confidence surmounts all ob- 
stacles and sweeps with the firm stride of a re- 
sistless assurance toward its reward and consum- 
mation. The unique, outstanding characteristic 
of genius is not the height and the breadth and 
the depth of the faculty it involves, but, rather, 
the heroism of the self-reliance it incarnates. 
Carlyle, notwithstanding the rugosity of his style, 
the violence of his eloquence and the Norse strain 
in his literary temperament, which eventuated in 



A FINE EGOTISM 71 

the excessive prostration of his spirit before the 
symbols of might — the Koenig, the Earl, the El- 
derman — the Vulcans and the Thors of myth and 
of history — belongs, by the force, the compass and 
the push of his powerful intellect, with the in- 
most aristocracy of genius. But, though his gifts 
were of a royal abundance, he would never have 
enriched and diverted the world with the illumina- 
tion and the satire of "Sartor Resartus," with the 
marvelous visualization of the character and the 
mission of Cromwell, with perhaps the most viv- 
idly dramatic narrative ever written, "The French 
Revolution," had he not been dowered with a 
confidence in his gifts that neither neglect, nor 
poverty, nor rejection, nor valetudinarianism 
could crush and exhaust. 

Many years ago, a young man in his late teens 
came from a far country to this great, generous, 
hospitable land, to make his fortune and to carve 
out his career. He came with a solitary letter of 
introduction to an obscure person who lived in a 
village of minor importance situated in an East- 
ern State. The world to which he came was 
more than a terra incognita to him. It did not 
contain within its boundaries one person whom 



72 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

he knew with even a remote personal knowledge, 
a single friend to whom he might go with the be- 
wilderments of youth and the sorrows and de- 
pressions of his isolation. He came to this coun- 
try after a succession of misadventures had wasted 
the family fortune into nothingness. He left on 
the further shore all his treasure — the family, the 
father, the mother, the sisters whom he loved with 
the vivacity and with the passionateness of love 
that make the early morning of life so beautiful, 
so wonderful, so radiant. He came with a pit- 
tance in his pocket, with sharp necessity as a 
companion, but with lavish interior wealth, a 
vigorous intellect, high ideals, a militant courage, 
a fine chivalry, a great expectancy and, above all, 
abundantly endowed with the splendid virtue that 
is the portion of all kingly men and queenly 
women — the Attic virtue of self-knowledge, the 
Hebraic virtue of self-love, the Emersonic virtue 
of self-reliance. He had faith in his star, the star 
of his own genius; and it did not fail him. It 
led him on, step by step, from the loneliness, the 
friendlessness, the lean fortune, the aridity of the 
wilderness of the early days to the rich, full bless- 
ings of the land of abundance and prosperity. It 



A FINE EGOTISM 73 

bore him on from strength to strength, from honor 
to honor, from victory to victory, until at last 
it brought to him an achievement, a fame, a per- 
sonal distinction, a professional importance and 
a felicity of life which in their magnitude over- 
shadowed the great expectancy he carried with 
him, in his heart, to America, as the major splen- 
dor of Jupiter overshadows the lesser splendor 
of the Planet Mars. 

The primal virtue in the decalogue of achieve- 
ment is not the talent, but the egotism of the 
talent. And it holds this position of primacy 
among the virtues because, of all excellencies, it 
is the most dynamic, the most fecund in glorious 
consequences, in the literature, the art, the liberty, 
the spiritual vision of superlative worth. We 
owe the "Paradise Lost" of Milton, the "St. Agnes 
Eve" of Keats, "The Little Black Boy" of Blake, 
the "Adonais" of Shelley, the "In Memoriam" of 
Tennyson, the "Pippa Passes" of Browning, the 
consummate beauty of Goldsmith's "Vicar of 
Wakefield," the critical insight and the subtle 
charm of the Essays of Matthew Arnold, the 
melodious cadences and the tender grace of "The 
Daisy" and "The Tryst" of Francis Thompson, 



74 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the Symphonies of Beethoven, the Sonatas and the 
Nocturnes of Chopin, the Oratorios of Mendels- 
sohn, of Haydn, of Handel; the marine paint- 
ings of Turner, tremulous with poetic sensibility 
and aflame with all the hues and tints of earth 
and sky and sea; the landscapes of Innes, envel- 
oped in an atmosphere of pastoral, mystical love- 
liness; the larger moral freedom; the more lati- 
tudinarian interpretation of the spiritual mys- 
teries; the Magna Carta of King John; the Dec- 
laration of Independence ; the growing altruism of 
church and state; and the augmenting humanity 
of modern economics — we owe all these treasures 
of the spirit, and innumerable other heredita- 
ments of light and hope, not to the discernment 
and the appreciation of the multitude who live 
in the nether world of self -distrust and self -de- 
preciation, but to the noble egotists, of every age 
and every country, who have been vouchsafed a 
vision of the good and the true and the beautiful, 
and who have had such faith in themselves, in 
their talent, in their gift, in their genius, in their 
revelation, that they have dared to affirm the 
vision to be of celestial origin, of celestial author- 



A FINE EGOTISM 75 

ity, of celestial compulsiveness, undaunted by the 
neglect, the unresponsiveness, the obtuseness, the 
doubt and the distrust of the world. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SPHERE OF ACTION 

In the high art of living, sphere plays a part 
second only in importance to the culture and the 
impact of the talent. Sphere is to personality 
what the body is to the spirit. The body does not 
bring the spirit into being, but it is the medium 
through which the spirit realizes its intrinsic en- 
ergy and through which the spirit unfolds toward 
its consummation, as the mystic essence of the 
flower unfolds through stem and leaf until it 
comes to its finality in the grace and fragrance 
of its blossom. 

It would be an audacity to affirm that spirit 
does not exist in the abstract. I think, however, 
we can justly say, notwithstanding the metaphysic 
of our day — a metaphysic buoyant with an ideal- 
ism that outsoars the heavens — that all we really 
know of spirit is as it defines itself in and reveals 

itself through the forms of matter, and, supremely, 

76 



SPHERE OF ACTION 77 

as it incarnates itself in and utters its ineffable 
ministries of life and light and love through the 
dear mystery and the wondrous mechanism of this 
mortal body of our flesh. The body, on this earth 
plane, is the soul's sphere of culture, of develop- 
ment, of action. But the soul, because of its in- 
finity, because of its inherent tendency to fuller 
utterance and larger expression, cannot contain 
itself within any specific form. The spirit of va- 
por is not content to abide permanently in the 
form and mode of vapor. It condenses, by the 
law of its being, under certain conditions, into 
the cloud; and the cloud is restless until it finds 
expression in the form of rain, which, falling to 
the earth, finds its way, as if by some cosmic in- 
stinct, to the spring, and from the spring to the 
brook, and from the brook to the river, and from 
the river to the capacious arms of the sea. The 
spirit of light cannot find peace within the far- 
sweeping boundaries of the sun. As if inspired 
by a sense of larger and diviner destiny, it bounds, 
with a great joy in its heart, into the abysses of 
space, to carry illumination, warmth and gladness 
to the distant planets — to Uranus, Neptune, Sat- 
urn, Mars — and to the earth, where it unfolds 



78 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the measureless bounty secreted in its diaphanous 
substance in myriad forms of life, of sentiency and 
of beauty. 

As Nature abhors a vacuum, so, likewise, she 
abhors containment. She needs boundaries, but 
she insists that they shall be elastic and dissolu- 
ble. She frets against all limitations that arro- 
gate to themselves the rights of permanency. 
However huge, magnificent, enlightened, beauti- 
ful the form, the system, the constitution, the civ- 
ilization, the religion may be, Nature will not 
countenance the indignity of a permanent impris- 
onment. The urgent tendency of the spirit of 
Nature is a tendency outward, to ampler utter- 
ance and to expression in richer and finer modes, 
to the attainment of ever-increasing empire. 

Now, this imperious need of the world-spirit 
for a sphere of expression and action beyond its 
own immediate boundaries is also the imperious 
need of that fragment of the world-spirit which 
we name "personality." Every individual, what- 
ever may be the wealth or poverty of his talents, 
the character and the complexion of his genius, 
is subject to the law and the urgency of sphere. 
Through the erosion of habitual indolence and 



SPHERE OF ACTION 79 

supineness of will, one may approximate the im- 
mobility of death; but so long as the body feels 
and the mind thinks, one cannot attain to a state 
of absolute inertia. The talent, the temperament, 
the personality is not sufficient unto itself. It 
cannot swathe itself in its acquisitions and hiber- 
nate through the years, living on its past expe- 
riences and felicities, as in the winter-time the bear 
hibernates in a mountain cave, living on the sur- 
plus flesh it has stored up from its foragings dur- 
ing the more benign seasons of the year. By a 
necessity more imperative than his will, by a com- 
pelling instinct of life in him, man must trans- 
cend the confines of his own personality and en- 
sphere himself in a world whose worth and quality, 
whose wealth and winsomeness will be largely de- 
termined by his habits and propensions. He must 
find a habitation for his talents beyond the periph- 
ery of self, with the same insistency that the 
tender melodies that swayed and surged in the 
heart of Schubert had to find an expression be- 
yond his ephemeral emotions in the notations of 
symphony or song. 

But, if conjunction with a sphere external to 
ourselves is a necessity of our being, the kind and 



80 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

character of the sphere in which the talent must 
operate and fulfill its destiny is, to a large extent, 
within the power and compass of our own choice. 
This choice is the most critical — the choice most 
fraught with the possibilities of conservation or 
waste, of power or weakness, of well-being or dis- 
aster, of happiness or wretchedness, of the order 
or incoherence of life — that we have to make in 
the course of our career. If the plenitude, the 
cogency, the beauty of personality, is the fun- 
damental condition of the victorious life, then, 
almost coordinate with it in importance is the 
condition of a fine and amicable articulation of 
personality with its specific kingdom, its native en- 
vironment, its congenial task and its proper avo- 
cation. 

An effective, radiant life is the logical equiva- 
lent of a succession of happy adjustments. An 
ineffective, a shadowed life is the inevitable con- 
sequence of a succession of misadjustments. 
Where one man fails because of paucity of gift, 
a thousand men fail because of the incommisci- 
bility of the gift and the element in which it la- 
bors. Where one man succeeds by reason of the 
sheer momentum and cohesion of personal force, 



SPHERE OF ACTION 81 

a thousand men endowed with modest parts suc- 
ceed because, through a happy accident, or a sub- 
tle intuition of their metier, they have accom- 
plished a perfect rapport of the talent with the 
task. There is, no doubt, an aesthetic pleasure in 
wearing clothes of a fine texture, but our com- 
fort is more dependent upon the fit than upon the 
costliness of our attire. So we may find a satis- 
faction to our pride in the mass or the conspicu- 
ousness of our endowments, but unless our talent 
works with comfort, unless it harmonizes with its 
avocation, it will not work with efficiency, with 
a prowess that conquers, with a great gladness in 
its heart, with a constant progression toward the 
heights of richest self-manifestation. 

Richelieu, when he revolved in his predestined 
orbit, the orbit of diplomacy and statesmanship, 
shone with a Jupiterian volume and brilliancy of 
light, but when, courting the Muse, he sought to 
rival Corneille in song, his efforts resulted in worse 
than failure. They were grotesque. His song 
was not the song of the cuckoo, an insubstantial, 
fairy thing, a voice, a mystery; it was the broken, 
unmusical chatter of a sparrow. When I read, 
many years ago, this anecdote of the attempted 



82 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

flight of the very mundane genius of Richelieu into 
the mystical world of song, with its consequent 
disaster, it served the purpose for which it was 
written. It touched the passing moment with a 
mild amusement. But as, in more serious mood, I 
reflect upon this foible, this vainglorious ambi- 
tion, this puerile adventure of the great Richelieu, 
who was the master of France when France was 
mistress of the world, this bit of gossip from the 
memoirs of St. Simon takes on the dignity of an 
apocalypse. What a deplorable waste of life, of 
talent, of power, of character, of pride, of seren- 
ity of mind and joy of heart, is forever going on; 
what a Niagara of waste forever rushing on and 
on toward catastrophe and nothingness, just be- 
cause the gift that might achieve, with a pleas- 
ant fluency of effort, distinction in the modest 
sphere to which by the nature of its strength and 
limitations it belongs, under the impulsion of an 
overweening ambition essays to master a world 
whose secrets are hopelessly beyond its under- 
standing, and whose burdens are immeasurably 
beyond its strength! The professions and the 
arts have been a Hall of Fame for the chosen of 
the Lord, but, alas! these battlefields of highest 



SPHERE OF ACTION 83 

honors are, for the most part, graveyards where 
the ambition of too great temerity has found its 
cruel doom and its swift interment. 

All effort is lost effort if there be not in the 
talent a sufficient potential energy to overcome 
the resistance and to lift the burden which the 
talent has chosen as its task and problem. If 
we would conserve strength and contend with 
the fire of a great joy in our heart and the ela- 
tion of mastery in our attack, we must not go 
forth to battle with the small arms of the single 
talent against a foe who can only be subjugated 
by arms of swifter action or of larger caliber, by 
the cavalry of the two talents or the artillery of 
the five talents. The spear of Saul is for Saul. 
The sling is the weapon for David. Had David 
gone out from the hosts of Israel panoplied in 
the unmanageable armor and overburdened with 
the spear of the stalwart Saul, to measure his 
prowess against the giant of Philistia, the song 
that would have come down to us from that mem- 
orable day would have been a dirge of defeat. 
The song rolls down the ages a mighty chant 
of victory, because the lad fought with the weapon 
of a lad, and not with the weapon and in the 



84 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

armor of a man. In the world of the spear, the 
valiant, young warrior of Israel would have been 
conquered by the spear. In the world of the 
sling, he was not only master of the sling, but 
he was also conqueror of the spear. 

A poet bids us "hitch our wagon to a star," but 
unless our gift be of great massiveness and mo- 
mentum, it would be prudent to connect it with 
a more manageable motive power. The gift of 
average dimensions would not shine with the star's 
luster. Its career would be a chaos, and its des- 
tiny a doom. It would not be saved by the star's 
brilliance; it would be swept to disaster by the 
star's rush and velocity. It is an exquisite sanity 
that finds a high accomplishment, an ample re- 
ward and a sweet contentment in the happy and 
effective union of a minute talent with a modest 
task. The genius of Burns was minute. His 
gifts were not of the Homeric order. An Iliad 
of large dramatic action, of histrionic measures, of 
far-rolling cadences and resounding rhythms, could 
not find room to gestate and unfold within the 
poetic genius of Burns, which was a genius as 
meager in its compass as it was exquisite in its 
fiber and its quality. The art of Burns is per- 



SPHERE OF ACTION 85 

feet of its kind, and it more than compensates 
for its lack in range and mass by the consum- 
mateness of its form, the witchery of its melody 
and the universality of its appeal. Homer en- 
joys the dubious distinction of being the most 
honored and the least known of the poets. He 
rules from a high throne over the noble, the elect 
constituency of the enlightened, but his subjects, 
though proud of their king, are few, and his king- 
dom small, almost to the point of extinction. The 
flight of Homer is too high, too sustainedly in the 
grand manner, for us. He awes us with his ha- 
bitual majesty and congeals us with the austerity, 
the remoteness of his carriage. We give the Iliad 
and the Odyssey the position of primacy in our 
library and in our academic reverence, but we do 
not know them; we do not consort with them as 
with familiar friends and beloved companions. 
Burns, however, thinks and feels and loves on the 
plateau where the commonalty dwells. He is one 
of us. He is one with us, and we are one with 
him in the dear cohesion of kindred experiences. 
Coleridge says, in one of his ponderous essays — 
essays not sufficiently known in this age of ours, 
with its cursory glance and its impatient atten- 



86 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tion — "I believe in the inspiration of the Bible 
because it finds me, and finds me over a larger 
surface than all other books combined." Now, 
this is the characteristic of the art of Burns, the 
characteristic of every art, however modest, how- 
ever microscopic it may be. It is the character- 
istic of the art of Albert Chevalier in his coster- 
monger sketches : it is the characteristic of the art 
of Yvette Guilbert in her chansons of the seven- 
teenth century — not less than it is the characteris- 
tic of the art of Burns. It finds us. It makes us 
one with itself in a warm and intimate community 
of thoughts, emotions, passions, of life and laugh- 
ter and joy and sorrow and love. Chevalier 
brought a rare sagacity to the contemplation and 
the measurement of his gifts. He ascertained, 
through a frank and critical experimentation with 
his talents, that the mechanism of his genius was 
as small as it was delicate and subtle. He ceased 
to aspire to achieve renown in the more formid- 
able drama, in the portrayal of Hamlet, Macbeth, 
Iago, Malvolio. He dedicated his slight, but ex- 
quisite, gifts to the halls, to the coster-monger, to 
the unveiling of the coster-monger's heart — his 
tenderness, his fealty, his humor, his pathos, his 



SPHERE OF ACTION 87 

devotion — and the result of this happy liaison of a 
slender talent with a minute task has been the at- 
tainment of an art of ultimate finish and loveli- 
ness. The charm, the beauty, the perfection, born 
of restraint and circumscription, that make the art 
of Chevalier memorable, are to be found, with an 
abounding fullness, also in the artistry of Yvette 
Guilbert, whose genius is atomic rather than plane- 
tary. I cannot think of her in the characters of 
Elsa, Isolde, Briinnehilde. One cannot associate 
her slender voice, her dainty manners, with the 
stormy divinities of Valhalla. Her art is the 
antithesis of the barbaric art, the muscularity, the 
Amazonian energy and fuss, the blare and the vio- 
lent eroticism of the heroines of Wagner; but there 
is more of beauty, more of pure and final charm, 
in her petite gift, working in sweet conspiracy with 
its infinitesimal sphere, than I have ever seen 
achieved by the most famed singers in the immor- 
tal tetralogy of Wagner. Every nerve in my be- 
ing has risen in protest and rebellion as I have 
listened, through many tempestuous hours, to these 
goddesses of modern opera shriek out their woe, 
their terror, their desolation, their hysteria and 
their love. But Yvette Guilbert, by the ethereal 



88 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

gentleness of her voice and the sweet reticence of 
her manner, lifts me into a world of pure delight. 
She finds me. She finds you. She finds us all. 
She finds the whole world. Her art is consum- 
mate. It is minute in its capacity, but it is uni- 
versal in its reach, its persuasion, its command. 

I have gone with particularity into the study of 
the atomic gift working with ease, with delight, 
with large and rich reward, with a splendid vic- 
toriousness in its small world, in order that you 
and I may avoid the maelstrom of inordinate am- 
bition, which sucks down into its ruthless and re- 
morseless deeps such a wealth of talent, of fac- 
ulty, of temperament, power, joy and hope. It 
is of vital importance, so far as the triumph and 
radiancy of life are concerned, that we confront 
the world with a noble egotism and a large ex- 
pectancy. Water does not, under the compul- 
sion of its inherent energy, rise above its source; 
nor does the performance of life transcend in ele- 
vation, in dignity, in importance, in fruitfulness, 
the ideal which is its origin, its motive power and 
its pattern. The great success, which, as I have 
said, is not measured by pelf, by prestige or by 
renown, but by the fullness, the richness, the mas- 



SPHERE OF ACTION 89 

tery and the joy of life — the great success is not 
a fortuity. It is not a surprise. It is the product 
of a strong, vivacious talent working in conjunc- 
tion with a congenial and adequate sphere. We 
must not smother personality under a mountain of 
ambition which is not the less deadly because it 
is flamboyant. On the other hand, we must not 
smother personality by confining it in a sphere 
which has in it no power of expansion, no room 
for growth. The world to which we have as- 
signed our talents, and to which we have com- 
mitted our career and our destiny, should be en- 
dowed to infinity with the property of expansion. 
The minute gift is minute only by contrast and 
by juxtaposition, as the earth is small only when 
measured against the magnitude of the sun. 
Viewed in relation to its potentialities, the least 
thing in this world is a matter of ineffable sig- 
nificance. A grain of sand upon the seashore af- 
fects the balance of a planet, the poise of the solar 
system. The word of a seer may contain within it 
a dynamic that will dethrone kings, overturn em- 
pires and consume venerated political and re- 
ligious institutions of society in the raging fires of 
anarchy and revolution. The most diminutive 



90 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

talent may contain within its hidden and mysteri- 
ous deeps achievements of inconceivable splendor, 
victories of superlative importance. And, there- 
fore, spaciousness should be an unfailing property 
of our work, our task, our avocation, our profes- 
sion, our art, our unique and personal kingdom. 
It should grow with the growth, expand with the 
expansion arid, with a gracious accommodation, 
recede before the advancing steps of our talent, 
the enlargement of our ideals and the constant 
increment of our personality. The stars must 
have space, ample space, in which to revolve to- 
ward their far-off goal ; and the talent — your tal- 
ent, my talent, every one's talent — must have 
space, shoreless space, in which, progressively, to 
unfold toward its completion, its destiny of di- 
vine perfection. Happy is that man whose genius 
finds inspiration and delight in the congenial air 
and habitation of its chosen sphere. Happier 
yet is he whose talent is inwrought with a sphere 
which contains within itself room for the realiza- 
tion of a large and noble manhood, for a full and 
fine felicity of life. 



CHAPTER IX 

IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 

As the earth is engirdled by an atmosphere — 
its inseparable companion and servant, the mighty 
wizard who takes the crude energy consigned to 
the earth by the sun and transmutes it, through 
friction and attrition, into light and heat — so the 
soul of man is ensphered in an atmosphere, an 
aura, an ethereal substance wrought of the spirit's 
essence and the stuff of its environment, which 
mediates between the inner and the outer world 
very much as the nervous system mediates be- 
tween the world of consciousness and the world of 
matter. The speech of the soul is too fine and 
mystical to be understood by matter: the speech 
of matter is too coarse and inarticulate to be un- 
derstood by the soul; and so the nervous system, 
which is bilingual, conveys the wishes and the 
motivities of the soul to matter and interprets the 
sense impacts of matter for the clearer compre- 
hension of the soul. 

91 



92 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

The optic nerve is a mediator, a buffer, between 
the consciousness of light and the external vibra- 
tions which reach it from sun, moon, star, or the 
artificial media of illumination contrived by the 
intelligence of man. Likewise, this mystical force 
that we call "atmosphere" is constituted neither 
altogether of the essence of personality nor alto- 
gether of the substance of the world, but is, rather, 
a mid-world, a composite of both elements. It is 
the coalescence of the emanations of personality 
with the emanations of the environment in which 
personality finds a habitation. It is a sort of 
vaster nervous system, connecting the spirit with 
its proper and particular cosmos — a psychic ex- 
change, through which we unconsciously com- 
municate with the world, and through which the 
world automatically communicates with us. 

It is impossible to define this self -atmosphere, as 
it is impossible to define spirit, or to define mat- 
ter. The forces of ultimate significance are all 
vague — not with the vagueness born of shadow, 
but with the vagueness born of excess of light. 
Life is vague. Beauty is vague. Righteousness 
is vague. God is vague. And yet all these vague 
forms of consciousness are splendidly real. So 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 93 

also the nebulous envelope, the aura we carry with 
us wherever we go, as the earth carries its en- 
circling vapors, is, notwithstanding its nebulosity, 
our intimate and boon companion. Its reaction 
upon the inmost essence of us, our thoughts, our 
ideals, our character, is as unfailing as are the 
reactions of sky and temperature and environment 
upon our dress, our habits and our moods. The 
functions which devolve upon it as an intermediary 
between the spirit of man and the outer world 
that is forever pressing upon it with incessant 
impacts — impacts agreeable and disagreeable, fine 
and coarse, sweet and bitter, ennobling and de- 
grading, divine and satanic — are of supreme im- 
portance in relation to the paramount aim of life, 
our prosperity, our poise and our felicity. 

What a chaos, what a misery, what a turbulence 
life would be if the world, with all of its disso- 
nances, its sharp angles and its irritations, were 
in immediate contact with the inmost self of us — 
if there were no buffer kingdom between the prin- 
cipality of our soul and the vast, unkempt, bar- 
baric, stormy host of Vandals, Goths, Visigoths 
and Huns which invade us from all sides and 
which are a constant menace to the order, the 



94 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tranquillity and the peace of our spirits! The 
world abounds in forces of friction and unrest. 
It is dishearteningly rich in irritants — irritants of 
stupidity, of impertinence, of crudity, of coarse- 
ness, of criticism, of obtrusion. It abounds with 
unpleasant circumstances, with undesirable con- 
tacts, with impoverished, angular, fretting person- 
alities. Death would be a bagatelle in compari- 
son with a life continually subject to the indis- 
criminate invasion of the mobocratic forces of the 
outer world. 

Pope bewails man's inhumanity to man, and it 
is a real evil, of which we are all vividly and 
painfully conscious. There is, however, an evil 
more insidious, more treacherously corrosive of 
life, more potent in the suffocation of laughter, in 
the smothering of the joy of the heart — an evil 
which we ignore because it is so invisible, so sly, 
so furtive, in its operation — the evil of humanity's 
inhumanity to man. An individual now and 
again, at great intervals, rises up among the 
sovereigns of the political world, or the masters of 
the industrial world, in whom the autocratic prin- 
ciple incarnates beyond measure, and who rules 
with arrogant scepter and ruthless power. This 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 95 

insolent lordship is very evidential, and, because 
evidential, it is easily and swiftly amenable to 
criticism and restraint. But the tyranny of hu- 
manity—the tyranny of the many who hate and 
persecute the few who love and have the fortitude 
to proclaim the truth; the tyranny of the many 
who have not and who envy and harass the few 
who have and who have what they have through 
a ceaseless self-denial, an unyielding economy and 
a zeal that has been a spendthrift only in the com- 
modities of strength and of ambition; the tyranny 
of the many who, sodden with conventionalized 
iniquity and legalized impurity, have striven to 
overwhelm with scorn and contumely the few he- 
roic men and women in every age who have sought 
the imperial sanctions of conduct in the vision of 
the soul rather than in the drab and seared con- 
science of tradition ; the tyranny of the many who, 
in society, church and state, in the domain of lit- 
erature, the drama, the fine arts, exalt and canonize 
mediocrity while they neglect and consign to bitter 
obscurity the few great spirits who by virtue of 
their clearer and serener vision, their high and 
regal endowments, are called of God to be their 
prophets and the forerunners of a better day; the 



96 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tyranny of the many who, as the Esquimau finds 
delight for his palate in putrescent blubber, seek 
for an aliment corresponding with the perversion 
and degeneracy of their moral instincts in the mor- 
bidities, the salacities, the scandals, the evil odors 
and corruptions of the social organism, and who, 
by their immitigable vulgarity — the vulgarity of 
their ideals, the vulgarity of their standards of life 
and well-being, the vulgarity of their manners, the 
vulgarity of their worship, their heaven and their 
God — strive, with a diabolic persistency, to make 
the world a pessimism and life a crucifixion to the 
high-born of the spirit who love the things that 
pertain to order, to beauty and to good taste — 
this tyranny, though more hostile to the world's 
well-being than the tyranny of the individual, we 
must submit to, like slaves, because of its magni- 
tude and because of its universality. 

If this world be a wilderness to the multitude be- 
cause of the hard, dynastic egoism of a sporadic 
individual — a kaiser, a financier, a magnate of any 
kind, in any domain — it would be, if its malign 
forces were left unhampered and unrestrained, a 
purgatory to the elect, who have to bear not only 
the pains incident to our common humanity, but 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 97 

also the more exquisite, the more excruciating pains 
which are the sad privilege of greatness — the pains 
which feast only on dainty food, on fine nerves, 
beautiful ideals and delicate sensibilities; the fair 
pains with which alone superior excellence can 
appease the remorseless hate and envy of humanity. 
And yet, though living amid this wild chaos and 
confusion of the world, the great spirits go on 
their way undismayed and unconquered, with their 
loins well girt and the calm, sweet light within 
them shining with untroubled loveliness and un- 
diminished brilliancy. They are in the world, 
though not of it. Wherever they go, they carry 
with them a protecting medium of defense, an 
armor of light, an atmosphere whose first func- 
tion is critical and inhibitive, which weighs and 
measures, by inexorable standards, every thought, 
every suggestion, every influence that seeks en- 
trance to the inner citadel of the soul, which, with 
an authority insistent and absolute, forbids the 
nearer approach of the shadowed forms that 
breathe only to blight and that touch only to 
consume, and which, in the name of the Master, 
welcomes the ministers of light who come with 
benedictions in their hands, to enrich and to bless. 



98 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

This critical, inhibitive function of the atmos- 
phere, luminous and protective, that defends, as 
with sword and buckler and shield, the royal spirits 
of mankind, no doubt seems mystical and ab- 
stract and not quite consonant with that hard, 
material instinct in us that labors unceasingly to 
confine the actual and the real to what can be 
measured and weighed and touched. Yet the sym- 
bolism of the defensive aura appears in every lit- 
erature. We behold it in the Iliad, where the 
favorites of the gods, in the crucial emergencies 
of battle, are wrapped in a cloud which protects 
them from the spear of their masterful and press- 
ing foe. We find it in the Old Testament, in the 
story of the three young heroes of Israel protected 
by invisible armor from the destroying flames of 
the fiery furnace. We read of it in the New 
Testament, in the record that reveals to us Jesus, 
after the declaration in the synagogue of His Mes- 
sianic mission and function, passing through the 
angry and clamorous throng at Nazareth unseen 
and unharmed. And we have a demonstration 
of its reality in the more cogent, the more indis- 
putable testimony of personal experience. Only 
occasionally, when there is some breach, some gap 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 99 

in the continuity of our engirdling aura, does the 
world, with its anarchies and distempers, invade 
the inner sanctuary of the spirit. Then, for the 
moment, our emotions are swept away in the 
"sturm und drang," the fury and the tempest of 
the world. We are lost in and dominated by the 
confusions of anger, of hate, of lust, of depres- 
sion, of despair. But, for the most part, our soul 
moves along the way of life with proud mien and 
unfaltering stride, its vision unperturbed, its vir- 
tue unmenaced, its serenity unruffled. The soul 
moves forward to its destiny, with the exception 
of rare and unusual moments, quite unconscious 
of the turbulence, the friction and the riot by 
which it is invested and which ever seek to under- 
mine its rectitude, its dignity and its calm. It is 
immune to the coarse, defiling touch, the asperity, 
the impurity and the grossness of the world. And 
it is immune because of its atmosphere of high 
thoughts and fair emotions, which automatically, 
without the intervention of consciousness or the 
expenditure of volition, rejects the evil — all that 
is incongruous with the fineness and the purity 
of its own nature — and gives entrance only to the 
beautiful and the good, to the luminous forces 



ioo EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

that are agreeable with its own essence and con- 
genial to the divinities within the soul. 

Again, it is, I think, in this vague mid-world of 
the spirit's atmosphere, in this psychic drapery- 
woven out of the effluences of the soul and the ex- 
halations of the outer world, that we find the 
personal equation, the differential principle that 
gives tone, color and separateness to the mystic 
influence of personality. In the fundaments of 
our being, in the central essence of us, we are 
all wrought out of the same cosmic stuff and en- 
dowed with similar faculties, varying greatly in 
degree and quantity, but perfectly homogeneous 
in property and function. However distinguish- 
able, by color and by structure, the body of the 
Arab may be from the body of the East Indian, 
or the Anglo-Saxon, in basic corporeality they con- 
stitute a unit without variation and distinction. 
However man may differ from man in vividness 
and vivacity of the senses, in mass and quality of 
intellect, in largeness and intensity of emotion, 
man is bound up with man in the glorious soli- 
darity of the essential powers of his spirit. 

Reason is not one power in a logician and an- 
other and distinct power in a child, or a man 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 101 

of untutored and undisciplined intellect. Rea- 
son is reason, whether its habitation be the mind 
of Hamlet or Verges, the mind of Socrates or Jack 
Falstaff, the mind of Spinoza or Paracelsus, the 
mind of Ignatius de Loyola or Martin Luther. 
The mythopceic faculty of the highly imaginative 
child is essentially one with the mythopceic faculty 
of Homer and iEschylus and Plato. The differ- 
ence is wholly one of scope and the variant sub- 
stance in which the mythopceic genius works. 
Love is a generic emotion that knits all the races, 
all the peoples, all the individuals of every age 
and country into a common and indivisible hu- 
manity and makes this habitable earth, notwith- 
standing the surface differences of races, na- 
tionalities and individuals, a vast fraternity of 
mankind. Beauty, though bewilderingly various 
in its standards, its manifestations, in the range 
and kind and ardor of the responses it evokes, 
is an impartial possession of humanity the world 
over, from pole to pole, from furthest east to re- 
motest west. It lurks an equality of endowment, 
though a boundless inequality in the properties of 
compass and fineness, in the touch, the taste, the 
sight of the Patagonian savage and the most 



102 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

highly finished type of man that modern civiliza- 
tion has evolved. The savage looks upon the di- 
urnal miracle of the rising sun and, with an awe 
more emotional than intellectual, greets the mag- 
nificent spectacle of the dawn of day with an in- 
articulate "Ah !" upon his lips. You and I meet 
this stupendous marvel of power and splendor 
with a more elaborate response, with a more articu- 
late adoration. The wonder in our heart is more 
complex than the wonder in the heart of the 
savage. To the savage the sunrise is the wonder 
of physical emotion, the wonder of surprise, the 
wonder of the unknown. To us it is the wonder 
of intellectual emotion, the wonder of divinity, 
the wonder of the revelation of the power, the 
wisdom, the majesty, the excellency and the glory 
of the Eternal. Yet the instinct of beauty in him 
is one with the instinct of beauty in us. 

If there be homogeneity and unity in the funda- 
mental faculties and powers of mankind, not less 
is the world a flawless communism in the distribu- 
tion of its wealth of treasures. Heat is heat : light 
is light: the sun is a sun: the star is a star: the 
sea is a* sea : the rose is a rose : the fact, whatever 
may be its nature or kind, is a fact; and truth, 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 103 

whatever may be its form or expression, is truth, 
the world over, east or west, north or south, in 
every continent — in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in 
Australia, in North and South America. Nature, 
with her retinue of sights — her symphonies and 
her cacophonies, her apparel of glories and won- 
ders, her systems, her laws, her forces, her epiph- 
anies, mysteries and concealments — is everywhere, 
and to all men, the same nature, though she speaks 
a language varying with our capacity to under- 
stand her ministries and to interpret her mys- 
teries. 

If, however, the elemental gifts, if reason, if 
love, if the instinct of beauty are the indistinguish- 
able possessions of all men, and if Nature is al- 
ways and everywhere the same equality of facts, 
the same unity of forces, the same solidarity of 
laws and systems, the same vast organism of boun- 
ties, how are we to account for the variations of 
sensibility, of vision, of character, of power, of 
dignity, of refinement, of charm that we discern 
among men? How is it that Haeckel interprets 
the mystery of creation, of life and sentiency, of 
consciousness and self-consciousness, in the terms 
of matter; that Spinoza interprets it in the terms 



104 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of spirit; that Fichte interprets it in the terms of 
the ego; that St. Augustine interprets it in the 
terms of an infinite, transcendental personality; 
and that Herbert Spencer interprets it in the terms 
of an energy not ourselves, not only beyond our 
present comprehension, but, by its very nature, 
unknowable? Why is it that the subtle and the 
faultlessly logical intellect of John Stuart Mill, 
after pondering upon and weighing the facts, the 
evidences, the achievements of the religion of 
Jesus, terminates in a Christianity that is purely 
ethical, without any element of the supernal and 
the miraculous, while the equally subtle and fault- 
lessly logical intellect of John Henry Newman, 
pondering upon and weighing the same facts and 
evidences and achievements, terminates in a Chris- 
tianity that overflows with the supernatural, with 
miracle — in a religion that not only exalts, but 
that exults in miracles, in the miracles of Jesus, 
the miracles of the saints of the church, and the 
miracle of miracles, the constant and continuing 
miracle, the crown and consummation of miracle, 
the miracle of the mass? 

How do we account for the immense spaces that 
separate the philosophy of life, the character, the 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 105 

faith, the poetry and the art of Browning from 
the philosophy of life, the character, the faith, the 
poetry and the art of Maurice de Guerin^ They 
were both poets, both splendidly intellectual, both 
men of vision, of fortitude, of rare nobleness of 
nature. Yet how different they are in their mes- 
sage and in the quality of their manhood ! Brown- 
ing speaks to us the word that is masculine, virile, 
bracing. His message comes to us as in the sum- 
mer-time a cold wave comes from the Arctic re- 
gion freighted with ozone, laden with vigor, with 
the buoyancy and joy of life. On the other hand, 
Maurice de Guerin speaks to us with sweetness 
of cadence, with the beauty that inheres in the 
gentle and devout imagination, with a grace that 
lingers, with a pathos of mortality shadowing all 
he thinks and feels and utters. The thought of 
Browning is stalwart and, to use Milton's splen- 
did word, robustious. The thought of de Guerin 
is exquisite, but fragile and valetudinarian. 
What, then, is the secret of these differences, these 
variations'? Why is one man intellectual and in- 
vertebrate, while another is intellectual and self- 
reliant*? Why is one man's morality hard, rigid, 
Pharisaical, censorious, while another man's mo- 



106 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

rality is tender, knightly, chivalrous and spacious? 
Why is one man's religion a sterile dogma, a sys- 
tem of definitions, a chain of formulae, a conven- 
tion without heart, a liturgy without emotion, 
while another man's religion is big with all the 
beautiful bigness of life and love and joy and 
freedom and eternity? 

These differences are, I am sure, to a large ex- 
tent a matter of atmosphere. The personal equa- 
tion takes on its special form and hue in the aura 
of our souls. In this sensitive, impressionable 
medium, that enfolds the spirit of man as the 
albumen enfolds the yolk of an egg, are stored 
up and secreted all our thoughts, our emotions, 
our passions, our predilections, our doubts, our 
fears, our hates, our loves, all the inheritance of 
race and of nationality, all the qualities, tenden- 
cies, ideals, instincts, proclivities, habits, attrac- 
tions and aversions that constitute our patrimony 
as Englishman, American, German, Frenchman, 
as Buddhist, Mohammedan, Jew or Christian, as 
Roman Catholic or Protestant. As the sun's ray 
assumes the color — green, or purple, or blue, or 
orange, or violet, or red — of the pane of glass 
through which it must come to reach our eye, so the 



IMPORTANCE OF ATMOSPHERE 107 

world, with its infinite variety of content, its sights 
and its sounds, its morals, its arts, its customs, its 
laws, its functions, creeds, faiths and worships, as- 
sumes the tone, the quality, the strength, the limi- 
tation, the light and the shadow of our specific at- 
mosphere, our peculiar aura, our personal equation. 
The fundamental personality, the radical man, 
the deep, inner man in every one of us, is uni- 
versal, democratic, cosmopolitan, catholic in faith 
and conduct. It is the atmospheric man that is 
insular in his nationality, provincial in his habits 
of thought and action, parochial in his church- 
manship and sectarian in his faith. How im- 
portant, then, it is that we should, by persistent 
and varied culture, enrich and refine this mystical 
atmosphere which reacts with such insistent pres- 
sure, with such subtly formative touch upon our 
inmost self, our essence, our character, the sub- 
stance and the quality of our being ! Time is not 
permitted us in the brief tenancy of earth's day 
to wholly recreate the aura of our soul, to com- 
pletely emancipate ourselves from the dwarfing 
tyranny of our prejudices, our insularities, our 
pettinesses, our inherited racial antagonisms, our 
national animosities and our spiritual antipathies ; 



108 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

but we can accomplish much if we wish and strive 
in the way of the transfiguration of the personal 
equation. By constant self-scrutiny and self-criti- 
cism, by incessant meditation upon "whatsoever 
things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are 
holy, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever 
things are of good report," by the redemptive con- 
tacts of fine and fastidious friendships, by habitual 
communion with the sovereign spirits of literature, 
of music, of painting, of sculpture, living and 
dead, the poets of form and of color and of sound, 
the prophets of the cult of beauty, "the master 
lights of all our seeing," by ceaseless aspiration 
toward the heights, by constant prayer for per- 
fection in the silence and the solitude of the 
sanctuary of the soul, by the perpetual oblation 
of self upon the altar of high thoughts and in the 
temple of noble deeds, by the daily practice of a 
life royal, large, considerate, fine, we can, pro- 
gressively, transfigure our atmosphere into an 
abode of light worthy of its immortal guest, the 
soul, the eternal self in us — one with the glory 
of God and one with the blessings and the bur- 
dens of humanity. 



CHAPTER X 

LARGER VISION 

If we should estimate life by its visible and 
manifest performances, the sum of its importance 
would be rather insignificant and not at all as- 
suaging to our pride. To the cursory glance, the 
average life is wholly without distinctive conse- 
quence. It is, no doubt, a force in the great hu- 
man mechanism, as a screw is a force in the struc- 
ture of a locomotive, as a star, however feeble its 
light, is a force in the illumination of the night; 
but when viewed in isolation and regarded as a 
separate entity, it is a force without luster, with- 
out paramount meaning, without uniqueness of 
character and function. The great hosts of hu- 
manity are individuals without individuality. In 
the drama of life they play no leading part. They 
personate no outstanding character. They rank 
with the supernumeraries who flutter about the 

stage in order to create an illusion of action and 

109 



no EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

to afford a neutral background against which the 
histrionism of the play may define itself, but whose 
entrances are without comment and whose exits 
are without observation. They are uniform. 
They wear the livery of the commonplace. 

It has been said, with a touch of scorn, but 
with entire fidelity to fact, that England is a na- 
tion of shopkeepers. England, of course, has her 
poets, her artists, her statesmen, her prophets. 
She is the foremost nation of the world in power 
of intellect, in social vision, in political honor, 
in the chivalry of arms, in urbanity of manners, 
in the art of living. Yet, notwithstanding her 
high excellence among the peoples of the world, 
she is a nation of shopkeepers. Mammon is her 
over-lord and trade her genius. Trade, however, 
is not prolific in deities. One does not go to the 
Board of Trade, to the Stock Exchange, or to 
the marts of London, Paris, Berlin, New York 
or Chicago, in search of the immortals. The im- 
mortals do not make the shop their habitation. 
The shop, as a rule, is hostile to eminency of per- 
sonality and inimical to the qualities that make 
for notability of nature and primacy among men 
of fine feeling. 



LARGER VISION in 

It was a saying of Bismarck that Germany is a 
nation of servants. What does this criticism sig- 
nify if it does not mean that in the opinion of 
one of its great masters Germany is a nation of 
mediocrities, a nation whose masses are as indis- 
tinguishable in their individual constituents as 
particles of star dust are indistinguishable the one 
from the other. Germany has its hierarchy of the 
illustrious. Out of the crude, harsh deeps of it 
have emerged noble and commanding spirits. The 
world is an incalculable debtor to German cul- 
ture, to German art, to German scholarship, to 
German efficiency — to Helmholtz, Liebig and 
Koch, for the advancement of science; to Kant, 
Fichte, Hegel and Eucken, for adventures into 
the elusive world of metaphysic, a world of be- 
wildering vagueness and of haunting charm; to 
Goethe, Schiller and Schelling, for the enrichment 
of the world of letters; to Curtius, Mommsen and 
Neander, for the enlargement of our historic con- 
sciousness; and to Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, 
Handel, Mendelssohn and Wagner, for the sona- 
tas, the concertos, the symphonies, the masses, the 
oratorios, the operas that have brought culture and 
delight to the ever-growing numbers who find in 



112 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

music a ministry of life and beauty of incompar- 
able value. Rut these mighty ones constitute an 
extremely limited oligarchy. Germany at large is 
a nation of servants, of regimentalized units, of 
mechanized artisans, clerks, porters, masons, car- 
penters, hewers of wood and drawers of water. 
It is a nation of menials, and it is a nation of 
menials because the spirit of Germany, when we 
regard it en bloc, is a spirit that, despite the might 
of its physical impact, is lacking in the definition 
of individuality, in the distinctiveness of person- 
ality that redeems life from its heavy burden of 
obscurity and inconsequence. 

Rut as humanity at large must share with Eng- 
land the stigma of being a nation of shopkeepers, 
so it must share with Germany the diminishing 
criticism of her one monumental man. Here and 
there over the wide spaces of humanity a soul de- 
fines itself in vision by virtue of its mass, its power, 
its luminosity, its loveliness. For the greater 
part, however, we are shopkeepers, servants, non- 
descripts, human units, lost and submerged in the 
crowd. 

And yet this lamentable collapse of life's values, 
this dishonoring pessimism that condemns all hu- 



LARGER VISION 113 

man aspirations and efforts to futility and noth- 
ingness, is an illusion, a fallacy of the superficial 
vision. We carry within us the incontrovertible 
consciousness of the greatness of our own soul, 
the dignity of our own talent, the eternal im- 
portance of the function that we have to fulfill 
in the social economy, and the inestimable value 
of our life in its bearing upon the world. We 
feel and know that we are, each one of us, "just 
a little lower than the angels and crowned with 
glory and honor." We feel and know, with a 
knowledge indefectible because it is the witness 
of the divine spirit in us, that there is in us, 
in each one of us, in the least visible and signifi- 
cant of us, "the power of an endless life." The 
spirit knows its own divinity and, by some oc- 
cult divination that operates far below the 
thoughts, emotions, ideals and experiences that 
float and eddy and are driven hither and thither 
on the surface of consciousness, recognizes the 
glory of its celestial inheritance. We are — not 
one here and there, but each of us and all of us — 
kings and priests before God. We belong to a 
knighthood whose patent is from eternity and of 
whose dignity and honors the accidents of time 



114 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

cannot bereave us, the supernal knighthood of the 
heirs of God. We take our barony directly from 
the hand of the King of Kings, and its preroga- 
tives are indefeasible. The inheritance of the 
lowliest mendicant is one in magnitude and rich- 
ness with the inheritance of the most exalted po- 
tentate, the most imperial of the sovereigns of 
the earth. Our possessions touch infinity on every 
side. Our empire is vast with all the life, the 
truth, the beauty, the splendor and the felicity 
of eternity. 

Spinoza, one of the most sane and dispassion- 
ate of counselors, puts at our disposal a secret of 
transcendent value so far as the realization of the 
dignity of the soul and the immense significance 
of the labors and performances of life are con- 
cerned, when he exhorts us to think, to live, to 
love, to suffer and to act sub specie ceternitatis, 
under the form and mode of eternity. It is not 
the bigness, nor the immediate masterfulness of 
life, but, rather, the eternalness of the energies, 
the benignity of the influences which emanate from 
it, that constitutes its essential divinity and crowns 
it with an excellency beyond the diminishing touch 



LARGER VISION 115 

of the outrages of fortune and the infelicities of 
time. 

Whatever may be our belief, or unbelief, in re- 
gard to the perpetuity of the soul in the mode of 
self -consciousness — whether we believe its goal is 
the inevitable extinction that awaits the flower 
that has lived its brief and beautiful day, or that 
it moves through the night of death into fuller, 
more vivid and more radiant self-realization, as 
a planet whose light grows in volume and splendor 
as it moves toward the zenith — it is quite certain 
that the performance of the soul in this present 
terrestrial incarnation is dowered with immortality 
and with the distinction that belongs to an end- 
less life. 

George Eliot, though under the blight and 
shadow of the frigid ethics of the Methodism in 
which she was born and from which, until her 
last hour, she never emerged, must be regarded, 
from the point of view of intellectual preference 
and spiritual sympathy, as one of the exceedingly 
small, but very select, apostolate that in the lat- 
ter half of the nineteenth century gathered about 
Auguste Comte, the arch-prophet of Positivism, 



n6 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

whose divinities are the illustrious men and the 
light-bearing women in all ages, nations, races 
and continents, whose worship is the adoration 
of humanity and whose liturgy is the prayer of 
enlightened thoughts, the aroma of fine actions 
and the incense of beautiful loves. It was part 
of the creed of the cult of Positivism — indeed, it 
was the sign of its superiority, of its high and 
cold culture, of its entire emancipation from the 
dwarfing influence of all credulity and supersti- 
tion, to negate, with head erect and with firm 
emphasis, all faith in the immortality of the soul. 
It was the belief of all Positivists, and, therefore, 
of George Eliot, that the soul and the body are 
coequal partners, indissoluble in life and in death ; 
that they exult in the sunshine together and go 
into the shadows together. And yet among the 
few memory-charming phrases that fell from the 
pen of George Eliot, the most fetching is the 
phrase, "corporate immortality," by which she 
means, not an immortality of personality, but an 
immortality of its effluences, its actions, its 
thoughts, its passions, its devotions, its heroisms, 
its loyalties and its loves. Death denudes the 
personality of self-consciousness, but it is power- 



LARGER VISION 117 

less to touch the mundane equations of the spirit 
— its labors, its creations, its embodied imagina- 
tions, its uttered affections, its incarnate nobilities 
of thought and character, its high and excellent 
accomplishments. The dynamic of personality is 
eternal. 

The unhappy negation of personal immortality, 
which finds insistent expression in the gospel of 
Positivism, evokes no sympathetic response in my 
thought. The whole universe, as it unfolds it- 
self before my inmost vision and my deepest love, 
is a vast and glorious immortality. The cosmic 
spirit, with an equal intensity, abhors all nega- 
tion — the negation of matter, the negation of 
spirit, the negation of life, the negation of per- 
sonality. The modes which matter assumes may 
change through an endless succession of changes. 
Vapor may pass into the form of water, water 
into the form of ice. Ice, under the action of 
the sun's heat, may dissolve again into water. 
Water may then take the form of a tree. The 
leaves of the tree may become a mold and in 
time be transformed into a flower. The tree and 
the flower together may, under the pressure of the 
ages, be transformed into carbon, the carbon into 



n8 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

a diamond. Yet, through all these changes of 
form and variations of structure, the original mat- 
ter-stuff remains the same — the same in substance, 
in quantity, in weight, in potentiality. Not one 
atom, through all these multiform changes, has 
been added to it, and not one atom subtracted 
from it. 

And as the monad of matter never varies, never 
increases or diminishes in its myriad mutations and 
multiform changes, so the monad of personality 
survives the shock and the change of death. It 
is impervious to the disintegrating touch of time. 
It is indivisible and indissoluble. It may go 
through an infinite succession of forms, of modes, 
manifestations, incarnations; but the unitary self, 
the aboriginal monad, the self of you and the 
self of me, survives these ceaseless and progres- 
sive changes of garment, as the ultimate monad 
of matter, whether it be the molecule, the ion, 
or some more ethereal entity, survives the cease- 
less, progressive changes of its modes. The genius 
of the universe is a genius of economy, of parsi- 
mony, of thrift. It wastes nothing. It saves all. 
The fundamental law of being is conservation. 
And if the Providence which reigns over the treas- 



LARGER VISION 119 

ures of the world practices a rigid and unfailing 
thrift in regard to the form of being of least 
value, matter, it would seem consonant with the 
highest sanity that it should practice an equally 
rigid and unfailing thrift in regard to the form 
of being of highest value, personality. This 
world would be an egregious banality if its stu- 
pendous mechanism should find its consummation 
in the lesser immortality of matter rather than 
in the greater immortality of spirit — if the ulti- 
mate ambition of the evolutionary process should 
be reached in a mass of star dust whirling in a 
wilderness of space rather than in great Plato's 
mind and in the Lord Christ's heart! 

But whatever be the destiny of the spirit of 
man — be it an eternity quivering with a tremulous 
white heat of conscious life and thought and love, 
or nescience and "the void immense" — there is 
a more than sufficient compensation for all the 
tension, the strain and the warfare that fall to 
our portion upon this earth plane in the disin- 
terested immortality of Positivism — the immor- 
tality of the artist in his art, of the author in his 
books, of the statesman in his oratory; of Spenser 
in the "Faerie Queene," of Milton in "Lycidas" 



120 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

and "Comus," of Bunyan in the "Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress," of John Selden in his "Table Talk," of 
Defoe in "Robinson Crusoe," of Addison in "Sir 
Roger de Coverley," of John Brown in "Mar- 
jorie Fleming," the short story of most perfect 
beauty in the English language ; of Socrates in the 
"Apology," of St. John in his exquisitely tender 
memorial of The Last Supper, of Jesus in His 
Logia, in the light, the vitality, the inspiration, 
the sweetness of His marvelous gospel, and in 
the majesty and grace of His yet more marvelous 
life. 

This corporate immortality — this austere, yet 
noble, hybrid of faith, the progeny of the wed- 
lock of ancient stoicism with modern science — 
which is the portion of the prophets and the mas- 
ters who have led humanity along the way of 
vision and of life, is equally the portion of the 
commonalty of men, however elementary may be 
the forces of their spirit, however slender and 
invisible may be the activities and influences that 
flow forth from them. Every thought we think, 
though it be submerged in the obscurity of the 
commonplace; every love we love, though it be 
swallowed up in the ocean of love in which it 



LARGER VISION 121 

is an indistinguishable drop; every deed we do, 
though it be lost in the inconspicuity that is the 
lot of all things trivial and unimportant, when 
once it has passed beyond the narrow boundaries 
of our personality to identify itself with the tremu- 
lous motivity and process of the world, becomes 
energic with the undying potencies of eternity. 

The material world as we behold it to-day is 
not the product of the activities of a few major 
suns. It is not the product of the sum of the 
activities of all its suns and all its planets. It 
is the product of an infinity of atoms which has, 
through the mighty mandates of the laws that 
govern matter, the laws of organization and dis- 
solution, the centripetal and centrifugal forces 
of the universe, evolved, in ways labyrinthine and 
inscrutable, from nebulous stuff into the noble 
solidarity of the suns and moons and planets, 
the systems, the galaxies, the constellations that 
make the sidereal world what it is to-day — the ac- 
tual universe as it reveals itself to our senses and 
declares its glories and its wonders to our intel- 
ligence. 

The human world also is what it is, not be- 
cause of the few men and women of unique power 



122 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

and solitary splendor of faculty — not because of 
its massive, mandatory spirits who have thought 
and taught and wrought in the colossal way 
through the ages ; not because Euripides has sung, 
or Giotto has painted, or Newton has discovered 
Nature's secrets, or Heloise has loved with a con- 
suming passion, with the majestic ardor of an 
Olympian — but because of the myriad hosts that 
have swept over its surface, its masses succeed- 
ing each other age after age — masses visible as 
civilizations, as nations, as races; masses discern- 
ible as Greeks, as Romans, as Persians, as Egyp- 
tians, as Jews, as Aryans, as Semites; masses who 
have lived and dreamt and loved and suffered 
and died, unhonored and unsung, but whose genius 
has found expression in the genius of the immor- 
tals, whose meditations, sorrows, struggles, loves, 
hopes and tragedies have found utterance through 
philosopher, bard, epicist, lyrist, painter, sculptor, 
dreamer, who are, after all, only the consumma- 
tion of the genius of the humanity of which they 
are a part, and whose highest visions have found 
articulation and attained to clarity of outline in 
the seer — in Confucius, in Sakya-muni, in Zo- 
roaster, in Mohammed, in Jesus — the seer whose 



LARGER VISION 123 

mind is the mind of his race and whose faith is 
the faith of his race in its high hour of visitation. 
In our casual way, in every department of 
thought and conduct, we divide the great human 
world into two categories — one the category of 
quality, the other the category of quantity; one 
the category of power, the other the category of 
weakness; one the category of the classes, the 
other the category of the masses. In the world 
of wealth we have the few masters and the many 
servants. In the world of intellect we have the 
few illuminati and the many illiterate. In the 
world of the talents we have the few men who 
govern and the multitude who are governed. But 
if we look just a little beyond the surface of 
things, we shall see that these categories are cate- 
gories, not of reality, but of convenience. Hu- 
manity is a vast organism. The few and the many 
are one. Their talent is one. Their power is 
one. Their thought is one. Their struggle is one. 
Their triumph is one. "Whether one member 
suffer all the members suffer with it. Whether 
one member be honored all the members rejoice 
with it. For they are many members yet but 
one body." The glory of George Washington is 



124 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the glory of the people he led and fought and 
triumphed with and governed. They belong to 
each other. Each without the other is inconceiv- 
able. If each were conceivable without the other, 
each without the other would be inconsequent. 
Each with the other is mighty, masterful and in- 
vincible. A Homer, a Vergil, a Shakespeare has 
never yet sprung, Minerva-like, from the head of 
a god. He emerges out of the loins, the expe- 
riences, the passions, the temperament, the genius 
of his people. Give Homer a setting in the Eliza- 
bethan age, and we should have no Iliad. Shake- 
speare in Homer's Greece would not have been 
the Shakespeare we know, the most opulent mind 
in all the world. He would have been a lost 
soul, a mighty planet without an orbit in which 
to revolve. I say it with reverence, but with a 
firm conviction of its truthfulness, that Jesus 
would not have been, and could not have been, 
the Jesus we know — the Jesus whom we exalt 
in our meditations, and to whom we give an ad- 
miration without reserve and an adoration that 
belongs only to divinity — had He not been con- 
ceived in the matrix of Judaism and nourished on 
the traditions inspired by the Messianic hopes, 



LARGER VISION 125 

had His heart not surged and throbbed with the 
theocratic ideals and expectancies of Israel. 
Homer's epic is a corporate epic, in which every 
Greek, ancestral and of his own age, had his atomic 
share. Shakespeare's genius is a corporate genius, 
which includes within itself the inarticulate his- 
trionism of the myriads of Englishmen of his own 
age and of all prior ages since England began to 
be. The spiritual beauty of Jesus is the corporate 
beauty of Israel — the beauty that had been gath- 
ering through all the long centuries of Israel's 
travails and trials and struggles, through its weary 
battles in the wilderness, its dreamings by the 
rivers of Babylon, its visions from Mount Horeb, 
Mount. Zion and Mount Carmel — the corporate 
beauty of mankind. He is the lion of the tribe 
of Judah. He is also the son of man, the con- 
summate flower of humanity. 

This, then, is what I mean by the vision of life. 
It is beholding life, not as a force detached, not 
as a force existing for a few decades in separa- 
tion and in pathetic loneliness, weakness and in- 
consequence, not as flashing into being and action 
on the breast of the river of time only to sink 
and be lost in the abyss — as a bubble comes to the 



126 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

surface for a moment and then sinks and is lost 
in the deeps of the stream — but it is, rather, be- 
holding life as a force, however minute and in- 
conspicuous, in conjunction with the world-proc- 
esses, under the form of eternity and immortal 
with the corporate immortality of nation, of race, 
of humanity, of the world. 

Fortune may have ordained me — she may have 
ordained you — to work in the shadows, to fret 
out our days in petty and imperceptible perform- 
ances. Our labor may be a drudgery, our task 
commonplace, without luster, without distinction. 
We may be lost in the indiscriminate hosts of 
menials who work without notice and without pe- 
culiar honor, in shop or factory, or office, or bank; 
in commerce, in state, or in church. Our deeds 
may be hidden in insignificance and our person- 
ality submerged in the vast army of thinkers, sol- 
diers, lawyers, doctors, clerks, shopmen, servants. 
And yet, just as the majesty of the ocean is the 
majesty of the infinitesimal particles whose multi- 
tude and cohesion make the ocean, so the dignity 
of humanity is your dignity, my dignity, every 
man's dignity; for the dignity of humanity is, in 
its last analysis, the sum of the thoughts, the loves, 



LARGER VISION 127 

the deeds of the myriad men and women, high 
and low, rich and poor, master and servant, finan- 
cier, lawyer, clergyman, engineer, artisan and dig- 
ger in the ditch, who constitute its bulk. The 
achievement of the weakest conditions the achieve- 
ment of the strongest. The talents of the many 
condition the power and the effectiveness of the 
genius of the few. The crown that symbolizes 
the might and the prowess of the king symbolizes 
the might and the prowess of his people and his 
nation. The immortality of the mass — the im- 
mortality of its works, its science, its patriotism, 
its songs, its heroisms, its faiths — is the immor- 
tality of the least distinguished among the strug- 
gling, toiling, sweating, battling hosts of this 
earth. Let us live, love and work sub specie 
(Zternitatis I And then we shall, even in the midst 
of its sorrows, its shadows and its trials, realize 
the sacred dignity of life, the infinite worth of its 
smallest services and the eternal value of its least 
accomplishments. How true, how finely and 
nobly true, are the words of the Psalmist, how 
rich they are in inspiration, how vital they are 
with cheer and with hope — "What is man that 
Thou art mindful of him*? And the son of man, 



128 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made 
him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned 
him with glory and honor !" 



CHAPTER XI 

DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 

The compression of energy is of cardinal im- 
portance in the realization of the promise of our 
talents and in bringing life to its highest effec- 
tiveness, its fullest supremacy. Concentration is 
the secret of all power, and habitual concentra- 
tion is the secret of all sustained and cumulative 
performance. The muscles must be woven into 
compactness before they can subserve, with the 
immediacy of instinct and with an adequate effi- 
ciency, the functions they are ordained to perform 
in the economy and activity of the body. 

All culture — the culture of the hand, the eye 

and the ear; the culture of the imagination, the 

memory and the reason ; the culture of conscience, 

of justice, magnanimity and mercy; the culture 

of the soul, of spiritual vision, of sensibility and 

passion — all culture, whatever its sphere or its 

kind, involves, as an antecedent condition, con- 

129 



130 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

vergence of faculty, compression of the energy 
of muscle, nerve, intellect, emotion, will. 

Cosmic energy must concentrate in the furnace 
of the sun before it can be transmuted into the 
solar energy which the sun pours out upon its 
planets in the creative forms of light, heat and 
life. Cohesion is to the fluid forces of the spirit 
what solidification is to molten iron: it is the es- 
sence of their strength, their tensility, their resist- 
ance and their power of conquest. 

Every reform has had its origin, its motive power 
and its progressive triumph in an idee fixe, in a 
compression of consciousness and passion that 
verges on obsession. Wesley, Finney, Garrison, 
Cromwell, St. Francis, Mohammed and St. Paul, 
each after his own manner and in his own king- 
dom, is the demonstration of a world-sweeping en- 
thusiasm that has had its origin and impulsion in 
a divine compression of the energy, vision, pas- 
sion and will of personality. 

Every neap tide of progress — the uprising of 
democracy in England, the reformation of Ger- 
many, the French revolution, the independence of 
the Colonies, the integrity of the United States of 
America — that has swept humanity forward and 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 131 

upward to higher elevations of life, freedom and 
happiness, has been the logical derivative of an 
enormous emotion compacted in a single thought. 
The shibboleth of democracy in England was "No 
taxation without the consent of parliament." The 
motto inscribed upon the ensigns of militant 
Protestantism was "The just shall live by faith." 
The fires of the French revolution were fanned 
into a fury of destruction by the breath of the mul- 
titude — the demagogues, the citizens, the jac- 
querie, the gamins — delirious with "Liberte, 
Fraternite, Egalite." The American colonists 
marched triumphantly on to an independent na- 
tionality inspired and innerved by the cry of free- 
dom that found a response in every colonist's 
heart in which the spirit of patriotism dwelt, "No 
taxation without representation." The redemp- 
tive watchword of our national unity through all 
the perils, anxieties and ravages of civil strife was 
the pregnant phrase that fell from the lips of 
Daniel Webster in a moment of overmastering elo- 
quence, "Liberty and union, now and forever, one 
and inseparable." 

And yet experience teaches us, with unwearying 
reiteration, that every virtue when carried to the 



132 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

point of the extreme becomes a vice. The courage 
that counsels not with caution becomes foolhardi- 
ness. The thrift that does not ally itself with 
the spirit of service becomes penuriousness. The 
zeal that does not consort with wisdom becomes 
arrogance and bigotry. Religion, when it over- 
flows the restraining banks of sanity, ceases to be 
an inspiration and becomes a morbidity, an op- 
pression, a pestilence. Prayer of disproportion- 
ate continuance becomes inaction. And the pas- 
sion of salvation may pass into mania and, as with 
all extravagances, become unsocial — as in the 
parasitic monasticism of the Middle Ages, when 
monk and nun, secluded from the stain and con- 
tamination of the world, strove, in an agony of 
penance and mortification, to attain to the white 
perfection of the saint, at the cost of the toil and 
the sweat of the sinners whom they shunned ex- 
cept when want necessitated contact; as in the 
mysticism of all ages, whose devotees, the volup- 
tuaries of the spirit, have fed their souls so con- 
stantly on ambrosial ecstasies that they have grown 
insensitive and indifferent to the common sorrows 
and the inferior needs of the men and women with 
whom salvation is not a luxury, a rapture, but a 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 133 

stern matter and only to be achieved through fear 
and trembling. 

Now, in accordance with the Aristotelian law 
that extremes meet, the virtue of concentration, 
whose secret is the secret of all power and domin- 
ion, and whose strength is the strength of the lords 
and rulers of the world, may be, when indulged 
to the point of exaggeration, a vice prolific in an 
evil progeny — a progeny of stunted faculties, im- 
poverished talents, misshapen souls, personalities 
without symmetry, compulsion or charm. In- 
deed, I believe this infirmity of the extreme com- 
pression of the manifold energies of life in one 
sphere to the exclusion and starvation of other 
spheres of personality to be one of the capital in- 
firmities of mankind. It is the vice of most gen- 
eral distribution, and a vice not the less insidious 
and destructive because its ugliness and malig- 
nancy are hidden from the sight of the casual ob- 
server and because it is a vice of such large ex- 
tension and popularity as to escape the reproach 
of scorn and the sting of criticism. We all err 
through the special emphasis of the part at the 
expense of the whole. We lay the stress upon 
the body and neglect the mind. We coddle the 



134 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

intellect and starve the emotions. We exploit 
the emotions and permit the conscience to waste 
away, as by a pernicious anaemia, in some unwhole- 
some dungeon of the soul. We congest with an 
excess of vitality in one part and atrophy through 
a deficiency of vitality in other parts of our be- 
ing. We make a fetish of the body and with a 
voracity that grows by what it feeds upon, the 
inappeasible voracity of vanity and pride and 
appetite and lust, it devours the aliment of life 
which Nature in her desire for symmetry intended 
for the spirit, the organ of the Infinite. We make 
a divinity of the intellect and we reduce, by the 
tyrannical emphasis we lay upon the importance 
of knowledge, the noble dimensions of manhood 
to the ignoble dimensions of the pedant, the pro- 
fessor, the academician, who may be an historian, 
a Latinist, a Hellenist, a grammarian, a geogra- 
pher, or an astronomer, but who, notwithstanding 
his familiarity with the air, the earth and the 
stars, the deftness and facility with which he 
juggles with Greek roots and Latin declensions, is 
neither a presence nor a personality. We scorn 
the flesh : we flout the intellect : we invest the sum 
of our passion, our enthusiasm and our thought 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 135- 

in the things of the spirit; and our very one-sided- 
ness, the inequality of our interest and the dis- 
proportion of our faculties make it impossible for 
us to attain to the spirituality that we have chosen 
as our good. A spiritual compression that does 
not take into consideration the claims of the flesh, 
the prerogatives of the intellect and the rights of 
the heart is not in the way that leads to eternal 
life, to sainthood. It is in the way whose end 
is destruction — the Pharisee, the doctrinaire, the 
bigot, the sectarian without imagination, the re- 
former without charity, the churchman without 
godliness and the Puritan without culture, without 
grace and without manners. 

When I have spoken, with a note of sadness and 
reproach in my criticism, of the partial and exces- 
sively emphasized manifestations of life that we 
meet with to-day on every side, and their im- 
perative concomitants, depletion, contraction, lean- 
ness of personality (for though in the march of 
life I have found many people who have drawn 
me to them by their weakness, or by their lovable- 
ness, I have seen very few who have compelled my 
admiration by the majesty and the symmetry of 
their force), I have been told that this tumorous 



136 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

growth of the special faculty, this blatant em- 
phasis of the departmental talent, is inevitable; 
that, through the exigency and pressure of busi- 
ness, time is not permitted man for general culture, 
for the equal nourishment and exercise of his 
faculties, for the impartial and unstressed dis- 
tribution of the divine ichor of life, for the evoca- 
tion and the fashioning of the whole man — -if not 
without blemish, at least without dismemberment. 
If this be true ; if the push and the pull of circum- 
stance be so constricting; if the tendency of mod- 
ern civilization, with its eagerness for power and 
efficiency, is ever toward increasing centraliza- 
tion, toward intensive limitation of personality, 
then modern civilization is an utter failure. It 
is a failure because it puts a greater value upon a 
part than upon the whole of life. It is a failure 
because it robs man of the largest and best por- 
tion of his being. It is a failure because it be- 
reaves man of his bigness, his nobility and his 
interestingness. It is a failure because it denies 
him the inspirations and enrichments of literature, 
of the arts, of all culture that makes life a thing 
of dignity and beauty. It is a failure because 
it commits man to hopeless ennui, to a dull and 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 137 

stupid routine of days, and stifles the joy which 
can find a habitation only in the soul that holds a 
large, free converse with the world. 

If the assertiveness of the talent be a matter of 
compression, the spaciousness of life is just as cer- 
tainly a matter of diffusion. The more the spirit 
spreads itself over the world, the more abundant 
are its points of contact and the fuller is its con- 
tent of sensation and experience. We grow in 
stature and in grace by dispersion. We say of a 
man that his advice is worthy of consideration be- 
cause of his large and wide experience. And what 
is experience but the sum of the facts and the sig- 
nificances of facts that the soul has gathered in 
its moments of expatiation, in its outward flights ? 

The worth of life is measured by its area, as 
well as by its intensity. The tree is rooted in the 
ground. It is stationary. It is limited to two 
elements, the earth and the air; and its relations 
with these two elements are confined within very 
narrow bounds. The bird also is limited, by its 
organization and instinct, to the elements of earth 
and air; but its range is wider, its aliment more 
varied. It is not stationary like the tree. It is 
not constrained by an inherent immobility to abide 



138 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

in an environment that may be alien to its na- 
ture and hostile to its comfort. If an acorn fall 
into the crevice of a rock and germinate there, the 
oak tree must abide and waste and wither in its 
inimical surroundings. It is endowed with a low 
vitality and a deficient locomotion, and a low vi- 
tality and a deficient locomotion imply a narrow 
area. But, if the bird finds its environment un- 
congenial, ill adapted to the needs of its peculiar 
organization, it takes wing and goes off in search 
of a more propitious habitat, where it will find a 
climate that accords with its nature and an abun- 
dance of the food it requires for the sustenance of 
its life. The dog is correlated with a larger area 
than the bird, as the bird is correlated with a 
larger area than the tree, because of the greater 
complexity of its organization. The dog lives 
in the air with less freedom than the bird, but it 
lives on the earth with more freedom, with a far 
greater range of contacts. It has relations of in- 
stinct, of sentiency, of intelligence, of affection 
with its environment inexpressibly more elaborate 
than the bird. It lives more and, therefore, its 
area of action, of consciousness, of response, is 
larger and wider. 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 139 

Man, by his organization, is incapable of the 
flight of the eagle and the speed of the greyhound, 
but the spirit of life in him is so rich, so varied, 
so elaborate that he not only adjusts himself with 
expertness to all the environments of inferior or- 
ganisms, but to an environment that is his pe- 
culiar inheritance, because of the vast, free range 
of his intelligence and the almost limitless pliancy 
of his faculties and organs. He lives in the earth 
and from the earth like the tree. He lives in the 
air and from the air like the bird. He lives from 
the water and, for brief spaces of time, in the water 
like the fish. He ranges the earth like the dog or 
the deer, in search of food. He is an inhabitant, 
with the higher animals, of the psychic world — 
the world of instinct, memory, automatic func- 
tions, sensations and affections. When, however, 
he ascends into the world of reason, of self-con- 
sciousness, of his essential humanity, he comes into 
contact with the realities that sweep far away 
beyond earth and water and air and the primitive 
instincts and emotions that link him with the lower 
creatures in the wondrous procession of life. He 
comes into contact, through his senses, his imag- 
ination, his reason, with the mystery of being, with 



140 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the infinities of space, with the laws and forces 
of the universe, with the immensity, the order, the 
wisdom and the glory of the eternities. 

Now, as the range and richness of its area de- 
note the measure of the dignity and worth of life 
at large, so the magnitude and the fullness of its 
diffusion denote the measure of the culture, the 
illumination and the grace of personality. The 
poet lives in a state of distribution. As a cloud 
moves with dreamy indolence over the tree-tops, 
so the spirit of the poet wanders with a leisurely 
pensiveness over the world, communing with the 
sights and sounds, the lights and shadows of na- 
ture, with the hopes, the fears, the joys, the sor- 
rows, the tragedies, the longing and the loves of 
humanity. The cadence dwells in the soul of him, 
but the message comes to him from without, from 
the peasant's heart and hut, as in "Michael" and 
"Margaret" and "Ruth," the pastoral poems of 
Wordsworth; from the primitive simplicities of 
rural life, as in that most tender and most human 
of poems, "Out to Old Aunt Mary's," of James 
Whitcomb Riley; from the joy and sorrows of 
friendship, as in the "In Memoriam" of Tenny- 
son ; from the pathos of tradition, the color of race 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 141 

and locality, as in the "Hiawatha" of Longfellow; 
from the wars and tragedies of time, as in the Epic 
of Homer and the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare; from 
the yearning and the travails of the spirit straining 
toward the Infinite, as in the hymnic literature of 
the church, the "Kyrie Eleison," the "Agnus Dei," 
the "Te Deum Laudamus," "A Mighty Fortress 
is Our God," "Rock of Ages," "Jesus, Lover of 
My Soul," "Nearer, My God, to Thee" and 
"Abide With Me." 

Homer must disperse his soul; he must adven- 
ture far and wide, in body or in thought, or in 
both body and thought; he must travel in many 
lands and undergo many experiences ; he must ex- 
plore the heights and plumb the depths of the 
mind and the heart of Ulysses, of Penelope, of the 
suitors, and journey over sea and earth, above the 
earth and under the earth, before he can give to 
the world the "Odyssey." The Epic of Homer is 
august because his thought moved with far-re- 
sounding rhythm through vast areas of tradition, 
experience and fact. 

All culture is distributive. Science must dis- 
perse itself over the data of physics, chemistry, or 
biology, if it would formulate with accuracy the 



142 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

laws of molecular affinity, the polarity of atoms 
and the survival of the fittest in the struggle of 
life. Darwin wrought a revolution, not only in 
the world of science, but also in the world of theol- 
ogy, by his epochal book, "The Origin of Species." 
But, if you read his biography, or the story of his 
travels — of his adventures, of his collecting ex- 
peditions — as it is recorded in "The Voyage of the 
Beagle," you will see over what wide surfaces 
Darwin distributed his intellectual observations 
before he dared to draw inferences, deduce conclu- 
sions and publish to the world his revolutionary 
theories. 

Wherein does Walter Bagehot differ from the 
other financiers of his day? There were doubt- 
less many bankers in England, in America and in 
Europe, in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury who measured up to an equality with him in 
weight, solidity and penetration of intellect. Yet 
they are forgotten. They are swallowed up in 
the lethe and the impotency of the grave, while 
Bagehot, though dead, lives and is a power, a 
growing power, a waxing light, in the realm of 
letters. And Bagehot lives because he refused to 
imprison his gifts within the narrow walls of a 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 143 

bank and to restrict his intellectual interests to the 
mechanism of exchange, the flotation of bonds and 
consols, the study of the moods and caprices of 
fluid wealth and the understanding of the economic 
factors that make for the contraction and ex- 
pansion of credit. He understood the mysteries 
of finance. He knew the methods, the preferences 
and the solicitudes of "The Old Lady of Thread- 
needle Street" with an intellectual intimacy ex- 
ceeding that of any other financier of his day. 
But his nomadic, inquisitive intellect could not 
be confined within the cramping boundaries of 
Lombard Street. It wandered along the high- 
ways of politics and the byways of statesmanship. 
It sought converse with the philosophers, the poets, 
the historians. It reveled in the winsome world 
of fiction and the drama. He sat daily at ban- 
quet with the masters. He lived with the mighty 
ones and in their works and characters — with the 
"Analogy" of Bishop Butler; with Tristram 
Shandy and Uncle Toby of Sterne; with David 
Copperfield, Pickwick, Michael Micawber, Harold 
Skimpole and Pecksniff of Dickens; with Joseph 
Andrews, Squire Western, Tom Jones and Amelia 
of Fielding; with John Balfour of Burleigh, Effie 



144 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Deans and Meg Merrilies of Scott; with Lavengro, 
Jasper and Isopel Berners of Borrow; with 
Dobyns, Lord Steyne, Crawley, Becky Sharp and 
Colonel Newcome of Thackeray; with Cromwell, 
William III and Frederick the Great; with Grote 
and Macaulay, Dante, Corneille, Moliere, Hugo, 
Goethe, Schiller; with the Attic philosophers and 
dramatists ; with the Latin orators and poets — and 
he has given to us, as the result of these commun- 
ions with the dignitaries of the world of letters, 
volumes of appreciation and criticism that will 
keep his memory alive and his spirit a potent in- 
fluence of light and pleasure so long as English 
literature survives. He belongs with the unfor- 
gettable ones because of the wide dispersion of his 
intellectual interests, the large and broad diffu- 
sion of his literary passion and curiosity. 

John Stuart Mill was the head of a depart- 
ment, one of a host of officials in the India House 
who have come and gone. They are lost in the 
promiscuity of death and as undifferentiated in 
memory as the leaves that fell from the oaks of 
England fifty years ago, but John Stuart Mill 
survives, a power of intellect for all time. He is 
immortalized in his "Autobiography," his "Logic," 



DISTRIBUTION OF LIFE 145 

his "Political Economy," his "Representative 
Government/' his "Liberty" and his "Subjection 
of Women," the book which is to the political en- 
franchisement of women what John the Baptist 
was to the evangel of Christianity. He is a per- 
manent figure in English politics and letters — not 
merely on account of the rigid precision, the almost 
mathematical accuracy of his intellectual proc- 
esses, but, rather, because his nature was lavishly 
distributive. It voyaged to the outermost limits 
of experience in search of facts and laws, in pur- 
suit of the wisdom in submission to which man 
finds his security, prosperity and happiness. 

Space — always more space! That is the im- 
perious need of the human spirit. We may exist : 
we may breathe: we may endure in some special 
nook of thought and action : we may earn a liveli- 
hood: we may eke out the sustenance of life: we 
may keep body and soul together: we may be 
signally proficient in our profession or our busi- 
ness: we may think automatic thoughts and per- 
form automatic deeds in the little corner of God's 
great world that we have chosen as our own; but 
if we would live — live in the big, the noble, the 
exultant way — our spirit must go forth, as did the 



146 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Jews in ancient times, in a great and wide disper- 
sion. The unique and certain way of power is 
compression, but the royal way of felicity is the 
way of the distributive life. The farther our 
spirit ranges through the exhaustless spaces of 
thought, of literature, of history, of faith, of hope 
and of love, the more jubilant will be the surge 
and the beat of the blood in our veins, the fuller, 
the sweeter the joy of our hearts. 



CHAPTER XII 

MASTERY 

The world we live in and that is the home of 
our soul during this terrestrial incarnation is, to 
at least the extent of a moiety, a self-creation. It 
is a mirror of our own manufacture, in which we 
find the real self — its ideals, its passions and its 
moods — reflected with scrupulous exactness of fea- 
ture and detail. There is a form of idealism that 
is so intensely subjective as to make the ego the 
creator, the sum and the substance of all things. 
The world, according to this highly sublimated 
philosophy, has no existence in itself.' It is a 
continuous creation and projection of the ego. 
Matter and space, the earth and man, smiles and 
tears, joys and sorrows, life and death, have no 
actuality beyond the periphery of self -conscious- 
ness. The ego spins the universe out of its own 
substance — its dreams, its imaginations and its 
desires — as the spider spins its web out of its own 
being. 

M7 



148 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

We all, I am sure, by an instinct of reality 
which is of the very structure of our consciousness, 
reject this philosophy, which is the ultimate form 
of egomania, as a fallacy from postulate to con- 
clusion. Yet it wears an air of verisimilitude, for 
if the ego be not the creator of the world of actual- 
ity that lies beyond consciousness, it can be said 
without exaggeration that it is at least co-partner 
in the creation of the world which is its special and 
exclusive abode. Man is, to use the pregnant 
phrase of Pascal, "un roseau," a reed; but he is 
"un roseau pensant," a thinking reed. He is 
dowered with the creative and formative powers 
of a demiurge. He can, by the affirmation of 
his spirit and the autocracy of a mood, transmute 
the gloom of the sky into radiancy; and by an in- 
version of the process, he can turn the jocund light 
of a cloudless day into shadow and despair. If 
the self in us be pathological, life is a malady and 
the world is a burden. If the self in us be tonic, 
life is health and the world is an eager stimulant. 
If the self be intemperately mobile, life is a suc- 
cession of swift and oppugnant sensations, a rapid 
flux of changing and contrarious moods, an hysteria 
in which laughter alternates with sighs, as the 



MASTERY 149 

sunburst alternates with showers in the early days 
of spring. If, on the other hand, the self be 
centered in the serenity of a sovereign purpose 
which knows "neither variableness nor shadow of 
turning," then life is a thing of order, with the 
stability of a coherent logic holding together all 
its actions and its enterprises. 

The spirit of Wordsworth scanned the world 
through eyes whose vision was tranquil and finely 
objective, and the world unfolded itself to his 
spirit a majestic spectacle of power and wisdom, 
a poem of cosmic magnificence and splendor, an 
epic of divine authorship. The spirit of Cole- 
ridge contemplated the world through eyes laden 
with the unrest and chaos of opium, and the 
world that answered to his spirit was infected by 
his own malady — it was nervous, restless, fan- 
tastical, morbid with excess of drugs. 

Job, embittered by the successive waves of 
calamity that swept over him and his household, 
"spake and cursed his day, and said 'Let the day 
perish wherein I was born, and the night in which 
it was said "There is a man child conceived." ' " 
Life to the Job of sorrows was an utter calamity, 
a catastrophe, a desolation, a pessimism, with no 



150 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

feeblest ray of light to relieve its Stygian darkness. 
The floods also swept over the stalwart, indomit- 
able spirit of Isaiah — floods of shame and wrath, 
of weariness and discouragement. Yet in the heat 
and the fury of battle we find him lifting up his 
voice in a song of supernal fortitude and death- 
less sublimity, "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. 
My soul shall be joyful in my God, for He hath 
clothed me with the garments of salvation. He 
hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as 
a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and 
as a bride adorneth herself with jewels." To 
Isaiah, exalted by the vision of the Messiah, "the 
Conqueror that cometh from Edom with dyed 
garments from Bozrah, glorious in His apparel, 
traveling in the greatness of His strength," the 
world was tremulous with the exquisite joy that 
fills the heart of the bridegroom as he goes forth 
to the nuptials that are to make the beloved his 
own. To Job, submerged in the tumult of catas- 
trophe upon catastrophe, the world was shrouded 
with the gloom and the desolation that oppress 
the heart of the malefactor as he goes to face his 
doom. 

Now, if man be the co-partner of the Invisible 



MASTERY 151 

Artificer in creating his own cosmos, in giving sub- 
stance, form and color to his own destiny, how 
vital to his attainment and happiness is the virtue 
of self-mastery ! If the world be a chaos, unless 
my soul be centered in an imperturbable calm, then 
it is my duty — my first duty — to achieve this 
imperturbable calm, at any cost. If life be a 
wretched and squalid poverty, unless my soul be 
rich with a priceless content of beautiful thoughts 
and with experiences of ineffable delicacy and 
fineness, then the duty of paramount significance 
in my personal decalogue is to feast my soul upon 
the meditations, the ideals, the emotions and the 
friendships that make for wealth of soul and 
beauty of nature. If life be a succession of petty 
frictions and annoyances, if its dignity suffer 
habitual diminution from the fretting and imper- 
tinent touch of trivial anxieties and minor cares, 
if its serenity be menaced by the constant nib- 
bling of uncongenial conditions and the ceaseless 
nagging of infinitesimal criticisms, then, again, 
the matter that is of major importance to me is 
to lift, by the affirmation of the will and the 
might of prayer, my soul into the heights where it 
may reign untroubled by the nipping fingers of 



152 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

circumstance — as the stars move through the high- 
ways of space, their serenity undisturbed by the 
fuss and the rage of the clouds as they sweep 
across the sky. 

Self-mastery is my task, your task, in life by 
way of preeminence. It is to life what arithmetic 
is to the higher mathematics. It bears the same 
intimacy of relationship to character and happi- 
ness that gravity does to the poise and stability of 
the earth. It is the taproot of all the virtues — 
the virtues of refinement, of dignity, of sweetness, 
of patience, of repose, of charm. It is the first 
link in the chain of power. It is the initial step on 
the road that leads to victory and honor. It is 
the essence of chivalry. It is the flame that shines 
with mild and steady light in the commanding 
eye. It is to man what love is to God, the sub- 
stance and the excellence of his divinity. That 
is a wonderful hour in the history of a life when 
the higher self, after the long and galling humilia- 
tion of repeated lapses, at last establishes itself 
upon its rightful throne and announces, not with 
arrogance, but with becoming dignity and author- 
ity, to the constituency that makes up its empire, 
the final victory over its own wayward and an- 



MASTERY 153 

archie tendencies. There is no moment more sig- 
nificant, more fraught with high and rich results, 
than the moment when a man can say, "I am mas- 
ter, I am regent, of my soul." 

Self-mastery begins with a proper and rational 
restraint of the various elements, tastes and habits 
of thought and action which in ensemble consti- 
tute our personality. Sheer negation is fertile 
with energy and achievement. Winter is an effi- 
cient husbandman. The frost plows deeper and 
with greater thoroughness than any machine of 
man's device. Poverty is the spur of success, the 
counselor of thrift and the impelling power of 
prosperity. The poet says "there is more faith in 
honest doubt than in half the creeds." The 
Reformation was conceived in the negation of 
Luther's mind, in his doubt of the validity of the 
morals and the doctrine of the Roman church. 
Quakerism — a most ghastly word, but which con- 
notes, perhaps, the most perfect expression of es- 
sential Christianity and the most exquisite em- 
bodiment of the religion of Jesus as a force and 
ideal of life that the world has yet known — had 
its origin in the negation of the forms and rituals 
which through the ages have exhausted the moral 



154 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

strength and sapped the spiritual vitality of the 
church. The religion of Christ itself had its birth 
—if not as a religion, at least as an historic force 
— in its negation of the emasculated traditions and 
the arid moralities of Judaism. 

There are times and situations in which pure 
negativeness is power in its most impressive mien. 
Silence is, in its proper place and season, more 
eloquent, more persuasive, than a flux of words. 
The restraint that is born of strength — the re- 
straint of dress, the restraint of authority, the 
restraint of utterance, the restraint of voice, the 
restraint of gesture, the restraint of manner — is 
always an arresting form of beauty. Character 
reveals its essential nobility and its innate aristo- 
craticalness with almost greater clarity of outline, 
and with even more winsomeness, through its nega- 
tions — its fine reticences, its subtle concealments, 
its diplomatic silences — than through its affirma- 
tive expressions and positive actions. Gentility 
almost touches insubstantiality. No quality of 
character is more evidential, yet none so richly 
abounds in negations, in what is not, rather than 
what is. A gentleman is defined by the repres- 
sion, rather than by the projection, of his person- 



MASTERY 155 

ality. Beauty of manner finds its inspiration and 
its nourishment largely in a decalogue of inhibi- 
tions. Repose in action; reticence in speech and 
thought; concealment of the sanctities of the inner 
life ; the seclusion of our sacramental loves ; silence 
in the presence of the great mysteries ; aversion to 
all that is theatrical and flamboyant; retirement 
from the confusing whirl and motion of the world ; 
abhorrence of the noise, the froth, the glitter, the 
fidgetings, the ceaseless comings and goings — these 
are the marks of gentility; and they are negations, 
beautiful, delightful negations. 

The virtue of restraint has a peculiar pertinency 
to our times. Our age is sadly vulgarized by in- 
continence of action, by excessive mobility of 
nerves, by the passion of change. It is an age of 
impermanencies, of fickle interests, ephemeral at- 
tentions, fugitive pleasures and transient enthusi- 
asms. We rush, without method or sanity, from 
New York to California, from California to 
Florida, from Florida to Europe, from town to 
country, from country to town, from function to 
function, from the drama to the opera, from sen- 
sation to sensation, from excitement to excitement, 
from cult to cult, from mania to mania. We are 



156 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

as volatile as the bee fluttering from flower to 
flower in search of nectar, with this difference : the 
bee finds the nectar, while we, instead of the 
nectar we seek, find the malady of nervousness we 
do not seek. Our civilization is a civilization of 
frayed and fretted nerves. The individual is 
nervous. The home is nervous. Business is nerv- 
ous. The theater is nervous. The church is nerv- 
ous. Our nerves are so unstable, so insolent with 
the tyranny of motion, that they imperil the de- 
cencies of life, insult the dignity of art and crucify 
the sanctity of worship. We have not time to 
read Thackeray or Hugo. We contemn Shake- 
speare as tedious and exhausting. Only with re- 
luctance and on the theory that "prudence is the 
better part of valor" do we concede the Almighty 
God an hour on Sunday morning. We have 
abundant time for trivialities — for dress, for din- 
ner, for the dance, for tennis, for golf, for yatch- 
ing and for polo — but for the serious things, the 
things that matter, that touch life with sublimity 
and crown it with magnificence, we insist on ur- 
gency. The dramatist must practice brevity in his 
dialogue, the orator in his discourse, the novelist in 
his fiction and the clergyman in his prayers. 



MASTERY 157 

Our age is great, impressively great, in the af- 
fairs of commerce, industry and finance, in its 
management and manipulation of matter, of com- 
modities, of wealth in all its forms. It is sadly 
lacking, however, in the ultimate greatness — the 
greatness of serenity of mind, of repose of spirit. 
We must learn the art of self-control, the art of 
self-restraint, the art of self-delimitation. We 
must subjugate our nerves and make them sub- 
serve our higher interests. We must conquer the 
passion of motion that spells vulgarity and the 
hysteria of nerves that eventuates in exhaustion 
and disgust. We must curb our volatile moods 
and check our appetites, and live with a fine and 
passionate loyalty in the eternal permanencies 
which make for the nobility, the beauty and the 
calm of the soul. 

But if the negative virtue of restraint be an 
element, it is by no means the most important ele- 
ment in self-mastery. The brook must flow within 
its banks if it would flow at all, for it is the 
banks which make the brook a brook. But if the 
brook would be of large service to the world, it 
must wend its way to the river and, through the 
river, to the sea. The monk is the very incarna- 



l$B EVERYMAN^ WORLD 

tlon of the spirit of negation. His virtues as a 
Dominican, an Augustinian, a Benedictine, a 
Trappist, are virtues of abstinence, poverty and 
chastity. Still, there is a vast gulf between monk- 
hood and manhood. There was a large, but not 
a sufficient, redemption for humanity in the re- 
strictive laws of Moses. The absence of the spirit 
of falsehood does not necessarily involve the pres- 
ence of the spirit of truth. Repose is beautiful, 
but the repose of a rock held in ageless rigidity by 
the unyielding arms of Nature is not comparable 
in majesty with the repose of a world that moves 
on its way through the heavens "Ohne hast, ohne 
rast," without haste and without rest. A peni- 
tentiary may be a model so far as the virtues of 
reticence and restraint are concerned, but we would 
not enthrone it as a school to which we would send 
our young men and women to learn righteousness 
of the perfect kind. The north and south are in 
juxtaposition compared with the distance that 
separates the negations of the Puritan expert in 
the law from the beauty of holiness that radiates 
with such vitality and sweetness from the person- 
ality of Jesus. One may be at the same time in- 
offensive and useless. 



MASTERY 159 

Iknew a notable churchman of the accepted type 
and of flawless reputation. He was an archangel 
in the morality of negations. He never, even in 
the most exasperating situation, in the red heat of 
anger, in the wildest tumult of his nerves, indulged 
in irritation or profanity. He did not permit 
himself the luxury of mild, though, according to 
the severest interpretations of the law, question- 
able, habits. He did not go to the theater, be- 
cause, according to his ethical canons, the theater 
was a satanic institution. He held no commerce 
with the simple diversions whereby the average 
man mitigates the pressure and the burden of life. 
All diversion was to him a waste of time, and 
the only way in which time could be honorably and 
legitimately wasted in the light of his austere 
standards was in stagnation and vacuity. This 
man was as harmless in life as in death, but, alas ! 
when we measure the power, the value, the posi- 
tive equation of his life by the contribution of his 
long years to the elevation, the enrichment and the 
betterment of society, in life and in death he was 
almost of equal value. He is wholly negative in 
death, and he was negative, pathetically negative, 
as a power for humanity and God in life. 



160 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

The impotencies of self-limitation have their 
explanation in the lack of an adequate finality. 
Restraint is not in itself an excellence. There 
is neither sanity nor beauty in mere repression. 
Virtue is not of the essence of the self-denial that 
has no end beyond itself. Self-negation is ener- 
gic with the divinities of life only when it moves 
toward self-consummation. We imprison the 
thrush in a cage — not because the cage is in itself 
a desirable habitation, but because only by means 
of the cage can we enjoy the song of the thrush. 
As I write, a narcissus, with lovely white blossoms 
scented with a most delicate and elusive fragrance, 
lifts its head over me as if in benediction. A little 
while ago all its subtle grace and aroma slept in 
the dark recesses of a bulb. If the soul of the 
narcissus could have uttered, in articulate speech, 
its grievance, I think it would have protested 
against the darkness and joylessness of its prison, 
but, really, the incarceration of the soul of the 
narcissus in its dungeon of ugliness and shadow 
was the decree of an inerrant wisdom, for it was 
only through confinement in the bulb that the 
narcissus could distill its fragrance and realize the 
perfect beauty of its blossom. The bulb was not 



MASTERY 161 

a sepulcher; it was a nursery. Its finality was 
not its own darkness, but the dainty loveliness of 
the flower that now looks down upon me in be- 
nignant ministry. 

Self-mastery, then, in its larger significance 
means more than a negation that exhausts itself 
in its own pain and barrenness. It means a nega- 
tion whose finality is a full and symmetrical self- 
expression. The rationale of all partial curtail- 
ments of life is that the whole man may be blessed 
with a larger and nobler prosperity. We bridle 
the passions, that they may not run away with the 
chariot of the spirit. We curb our ambitions, that 
they may not consume the peace of the mind and 
imperil the felicity of the heart. We delimit the 
power and the authority of the intellect, that the 
intellect may not encroach upon the rights of the 
emotions and bereave them of their gayety and joy- 
ousness. We confine the conscience within due 
bounds, that it may not turn the sweetness of life 
into bitterness and the joy of life into sorrow. 
We circumscribe our emotions, that they may not 
suborn reason, dethrone conscience and reduce to 
nothingness, with the intensity of their fires, the 
noble edifice of life wrought out of the fair dreams 



162 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of our spirit and the red blood that flows in our 
veins. The fragmentary self immures itself for 
a moment to earn for the whole self an eternal 
freedom. We die in the flesh to-day to live more 
copiously in the flesh to-morrow. We die in the 
mind to-day to live more richly, more abundantly, 
in the mind through all the aeons that lie before 
us. It was not for any intrinsic and ultimate 
virtue in the pain and ignominy of Calvary: it 
was for "the joy that was set before Him" that the 
Great Sufferer bore the indignity and the shame of 
the cross. Jesus gave Himself up in a superb and 
godlike act of self-mastery to the tragedy of the 
crucifixion because through the cross, and only 
through the cross, could truth find in Him its no- 
blest utterance, heroism its highest glory, power its 
supreme sovereignty, holiness its consummate 
beauty and majesty a world empire. 

The world is still, so far as its unthinking masses 
are concerned, deplorably in bondage to the ethics 
of antiquity, which sought to exalt man and glor- 
ify God by sacramentalizing poverty and canon- 
izing pain. The world's conception of a halo is 
a vast self-denial. The soul is divine, not by vir- 
tue of its possessions, but by virtue of its elimina- 



MASTERY 163 

tionS— its poverty, its humility, its chastity, its 
virginity, its fasting, its deprivation, its hunger 
and its thirst. But this austerity of conscience 
that identifies righteousness with gloom, holiness 
with penance and salvation with eternal self-ex- 
haustion, is not self-mastery. It is self -per ver- 
sion: it is self-debasement: it is self-destruction; 
but it is not self-mastery. Self-mastery is affirm- 
ative in its method and positive in its aim, which is 
life, always life — abounding, proportioned, radi- 
ant and exultant life. Its ultimate good is the en- 
during serenity and the flawless joy of the spirit, 
the eternal smile of the soul. Its government is 
the synthetical government of the democracy of 
all the factors and the elements of human nature. 
That man is not the master of himself who gives 
the primacy to the will, or to the intellect, or to 
the emotions, or to the passions. That man is 
master of himself who, by a wise and equitable 
management, makes all the diverse and varied 
powers of his being minister to the totality and the 
triumph of personality, and who harmonizes body, 
mind, heart and soul so that "they make one music 
as before, but vaster," more sublime, a perfect 
symphony of life. 



CHAPTER XIII 

OUTWARDNESS 

Man is, by the structure of his being, an 
amphibian. He lives by an equal necessity, but 
not always with an equal facility and intensity, 
in two kingdoms — the inner kingdom of self -con- 
sciousness and the outer kingdom of actuality. It 
is one of the foremost concerns of life to bring 
these two kingdoms into progressive equipol- 
lence, into mobile equilibrium, so that the self in 
us will neither be wearied with its own compan- 
ionship nor oppressed by the bigness and the bur- 
den of a world it cannot assimilate and digest. 

A fine passion of domesticity reigns in the sub- 
stance of the soul. We know, as if by some cryp- 
tic instinct, that the kingdom of heaven is within 
us; that the beholding eye brightens or dims the 
light of day; and that the beat of the spirit condi- 
tions the rhythm of the world. The self urged 

by the compulsion of hunger goes forth into the 

164 



OUTWARDNESS 165 

outer world in search of aliment, sensation, ex- 
perience, knowledge, love and beauty. After a 
brief visit in this far-away land, it is overcome 
with nostalgia and finds no rest until it has re- 
turned to its proper and familiar habitation. 
There is no home in which we are so comfortable, 
with which we are so completely en rapport, as 
the home of our own thoughts and emotions, the 
home of our own soul. The most of us would 
rather live in the narrow cabin of self than in the 
vast palace of the universe. And yet this prone- 
ness to self -habitation may, in its extreme forms, 
work irreparable harm to the spirit and, by in- 
sidious encroachments, deprive it of power and be- 
reave it of health and happiness. 

The talent that rests in the comfort of inertia, 
within the confining limits of its present achieve- 
ment, is doomed to atrophy by a law that is as in- 
exorable as it is just. The citizen whose thoughts 
never wander beyond the boundaries of his locality 
becomes constantly more insular. The magnitude 
of the planet and the importance of the nation be- 
come reduced to the magnitude and the importance 
of the town in which he lives. The religion that 
cannot behold God except in the creed and the 



166 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

worship of its own temple moves in a way whose 
mournful finale is inanition and death. Exces- 
sive subjectivity is to the soul what corpulency is 
to the body. It is a disease laden with atony and 
morbidity, as corpulency of body is laden with 
indolence and infirmity. It is a drug that preys, 
with a feline treachery, upon the nerve and fiber 
of personality. It measures life by the canon 
of a pessimism born of debility and enshrouds the 
world in the jaundice of the soul. 

What a pathetic loveliness broods over the pages 
of "The Memorials of a Quiet Life" by Augustus 
Hare ! It is a passionate, though subdued, solilo- 
quy on the transitoriness, the pathos and the mys- 
tery of life. It is quintessential in its charm and 
delicacy. But its charm is the charm of languor, 
and its delicacy is the delicacy of invalidism. It 
is a sustained "Traumerei." The odor that 
clings to its every meditation in my memory is the 
odor of the violet, which, though pleasant to the 
sense of smell, by reason of its subtlety always 
brings to my mind the thought of the transiency, 
the mortality, of all things. 

There is quite often an appealing beauty in 
weakness. The flower of the strawberry shrub 



OUTWARDNESS 167 

is odorless until it is bruised by some alien and 
hostile touch. Its delicious fragrance has its birth 
in outrage and indignity. Our neighbor passes 
us with proud carriage, buoyant step, and he comes 
and goes without commanding our admiration, 
without changing the beat of our heart. His 
strength is not sufficiently accentuated to be im- 
pressive and mandatory. It finds us, and leaves 
us, indifferent and unresponsive. But some day 
a searching sorrow, an overwhelming shame, comes 
to him, crushing into the dust his habitual pride 
and self-sufficiency; and then, in his sorrow, his 
humiliation, his defeat, our thought goes out to 
him in tenderness, in comradeship, in love. We 
are drawn to him by the appealing beauty of 
weakness, of deficiency. We are one with him in 
the somber confederacy of sorrow. 

And there are books which fascinate by their 
pathology, whose beauty is the beauty of a soul in 
dissolution, of a heart habited in woe, of a will 
overmastered and dethroned. What an allure- 
ment do we find in "The Imitation of Christ" of 
Thomas a Kempis, in "The Way of Perfection' ' 
of St. Theresa, in "The Holy Living and Dying" 
of Jeremy Taylor, in the Journal of Maurice de 



168 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Guerin, in the "Obermann" of Senancour, in 
"Recit d'une Soeur" of Mrs. Augustus Craven, in 
the "Journal In time" of Amiel and in the "Pray- 
ers and Religious Dissertations" of Madame 
Guyon ! Yet the grace that haunts the pages of 
these great books that have earned for themselves 
a permanent place in literature is the grace of ex- 
haustion, of weakness, of despair, of contrition, 
of suffering, of sin, of sorrow, of death. They 
are the beautiful morbidities of souls that have 
lost their poise, their sanity, their virility, their 
buoyancy through habitual self -confinement and 
incontinent self -introspection. 

It should be the cardinal function of religion 
to emancipate man from all the parochialisms of 
his nature. The very nomenclature of the spirit- 
ual consciousness is fraught with suggestions of 
immensity and enceinte with ideals whose scope 
and elevation should eventuate in largeness of out- 
look, in nobility of thought and magnificence of 
conduct. As soon as the race-consciousness — 
whether it be in the Hindu, in the Egyptian, in 
the Parsee, in the Greek, in the Slav, or in the 
Anglo-Saxon — arrives at the stage of adolescence, 
it thinks of the Eternal in the terms of infinity. 



OUTWARDNESS 169 

God, whatever His name may be — Jehovah, 
Brahma, Zeus, Allah, Jupiter, Dieu, Eternal En- 
ergy, First Cause, or Divine Principle — is clothed 
with the attributes of power, wisdom, holiness, 
beauty, love, lifted to such ineffable heights as to 
be lost in the immensity and vagueness of the 
absolute. If man were to reflect in the practical 
affairs of life — in business, in politics, in society, 
in the home, in the church, in the nation — the 
monumental and stately affirmations of his theo- 
cratic consciousness, he would be a very god on 
earth and the kingdom of heaven a vivid and 
glorious actuality in time, and not the pale fabric 
of a dream. 

But religion as we behold it defined in the ac- 
tualities of life — in the conduct and the manners 
of the communion of the saints of every age, cult 
and church — does not, in the least degree, assume 
the qualities of greatness, magnificence and nobil- 
ity. The thing that impresses one in the contem- 
plation of the spiritual life of the average com- 
municant is the paltriness, the mediocrity, the in- 
congruity and the utter gracelessness of his stand- 
ards and his performances. Our Christian civil- 
ization, in its emphasis of the materialities, its furi- 



170 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

cms greed, its inappeasable avarice, its blatant com- 
mercialism, its lust of power and display, its 
cruelty, its ruthlessness, its destructiveness and its 
militancy, is a mockery and the precise antithesis 
of the spirit of the Jesus of the New Testament. 
The most Christless civilization in the world to- 
day is the Christian civilization. It is the civil- 
ization most signally dominated by the mania of 
matter, by the vanity of appearances, by the tyr- 
anny of power and by the lust of blood. The 
real peril to humanity is not the Yellow Peril: it 
is not the peril of Confucianism, or Shintoism; it 
is, if we are to judge by the stern facts which limn 
themselves in our vision at the present moment 
with appalling vividness of outline — the hate, the 
barbarity, the deficient chivalry, the brutal fury 
of our militancy and the mass and destructiveness 
of our armaments — the peril of the white man, the 
peril of a Christian civilization that ignores Christ 
as an impracticable idealist and dreamer. 

If we were to ask for an explanation of this 
tragical collapse of essential Christianity, we 
would find it in the excessive interiority of our 
religious theories and our spiritual standards. 
The Romanist has not turned his thought outward 



OUTWARDNESS 171 

to study theology and ecclesiasticism at the feet of 
the Master of the church. His doctrines are all 
home-made, manufactured in the Vatican by 
cardinals and pope. The Immaculate Concep- 
tion, the Real Presence, Transubstantiation, the 
Miracle of the Mass, the Seven Sacraments — these 
doctrines are not Biblical. They are not derived 
from the teachings of Christ, or sanctioned by the 
example of Christ. They are pure subjectivity, 
woven out of the tradition-dominated imagination 
and the sterile logic of pope, presbyter and monk. 
The Augustinianism which runs, a black thread 
of horror and despair, through the history, the 
theology, the creeds, the moralities and the 
liturgies of the Roman, the Anglican and the 
Protestant churches has not its foundation in the 
salubrious, the bold, the free, the glorious God- 
consciousness of Jesus. Its foundation is the 
barren scholasticism and the sin-sick conscience of 
Augustine, the sovereign theologian of the Chris- 
tian church, who supplanted the noble sanities 
of the religion of the Jesus of the Gospels by a 
religion that is a hybrid of metaphysic and 
Manichseism, and which has dominated the West- 
ern church in all its forms to our own day. 



172 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Consider, further, the expression of the spiritual 
instinct in the most objective of all religious 
modes, mysticism! The other-worldliness, the 
vagueness, the elusiveness, the tranquillity, the sub- 
lime self -transcendence of mysticism constitute an 
almost perfect body of divinity. Mysticism con- 
tains within its highly etherealized substance more 
of reality, more of truth, more of the sweep, the 
majesty and the repose of the Eternal; it ap- 
proximates more closely to the sacramental, the 
beatific coalescence of the finite spirit of man with 
the vast ocean of being, of light and of love, than 
any other form that the genius of religion has as- 
sumed in the course of its evolution. When we 
read the "Theologia Germanica," the letters of 
Samuel Rutherford, the writings of Madame 
Swetchine, the journal of John Wesley, "The 
Treasures of the Humble" by Maeterlinck, the 
writings of Bohme, Bernard of Clairvaux, Wil- 
liam Law and Thomas Erskine, we feel, with an 
instinct whose cogency of demonstration is more 
trustworthy, more incontrovertible than the de- 
terminations of reason, that we are in the presence 
of truth and in touch with those who live with a 
beautiful naturalness and familiarity in abiding 



OUTWARDNESS 173 

communion with the everlasting realities. Again, 
however, even the fair history of mysticism is 
shadowed with the record of many and multi- 
form extravagances of thought and conduct. It 
has had, through all the phases of its development, 
an affinity for the morbid and has not seldom 
allied itself with the maladies of the soul which 
have their origin in abnormal self-containment, 
hysteria, nymphomania, eroticism, catalepsy, 
trance and hallucination. 

Wherever we turn, the lesson is thrust upon us 
that the self is not sufficient unto itself, and that 
if it courts solitude and seclusion beyond measure 
it becomes sick with the inflammations, the fevers, 
the disorders that undue confinement generates, 
whether it be in the cell of a prison or in the dun- 
geon of the soul. 

Man's salvation lies in contact with the actual, 
in overleaping the metes and bounds of his spirit, 
that he may be in touch with the great, tonic outer 
world — with the hills, the streams and the mead- 
ows ; with the air, the winds and the sky ; with the 
sunshine, the storms and the showers; with the 
zephyrs of May and the blasts of December ; with 
the energy, the poise, the vigor, the health, the 



174 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

facts and the forces of Nature ; with the struggles, 
the sorrows, the joys, the passions, the comedies, 
the tragedies, the smiles, the tears, the loves of 
humanity; with the vast, inscrutable over- world, 
the world of mystery and permanency, the world 
of the ideal, of the perfect, of spiritual comple- 
tion, of the final harmony of all things, the ulti- 
mate concord of all spirits, the world of the real, 
of the Eternal, of immortal life and the Infinite 
God. 

The capacities of the victorious life are within 
us, but the stuff, the content, the kinetic energy 
of the victorious life lie ever beyond us in the 
treasury of the universe, which imposes a usury 
of effort for every loan it grants us in the way of 
power and health and mastery. An hour with 
nature has in it more of therapeutic value, more 
of the glow and the zest of health, more of the 
bound and afflatus of life than one could find 
in the meditations of a whole day upon the 
euphemisms of our modern cults. Health is not 
a metaphysical puerility. It is a splendid activ- 
ity of all the members, all the organs, all the 
functions of the body. It is not the equation of a 
divine theory. It is the equation of a divine ac- 



OUTWARDNESS 175 

tion. It is not an affair of indolent syllogisms. 
It is an affair of incessant and arduous contacts 
with the earth, the air and the wind. It was in 
the open world of nature that Richard Jefferies 
felt the elan, the inspiration, the intoxication of 
health and life and happiness that surge and vi- 
brate in the incandescent prose of "The Story of 
My Heart." He was, like Stevenson, frail of 
body; yet through the constant exposure of his 
body, his nerves, his soul, to the whip and the 
sting, the verve and the vril that came sweeping 
toward him over the downs and across the sea — 
the rush of the winds, the clash of the storms and 
the jubilant air that dances on the hill-tops and 
frolics in the meadows — there coursed in his veins 
the blood of a Viking, laden with a superfluity of 
vigor, with an ecstasy of life. 

What an air of health we breathe in when we 
read the "Romany Rye" of George Borrow, who 
loved nature with the consuming passion with 
which the bee loves the elder-flower! Borrow is 
the most superb and lordly figure of the open air 
in all the range of literature. Were he living to- 
day, we would not see him on the tennis court, 
or on the golf course, or on the football field. He 



176 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

would have suffocated for lack of space and mo- 
tion within the constricted boundaries imposed 
by our modern athletics. He would be on the 
highways, with chest inflated and arms swinging, 
moving with great strides over the fields and the 
meadows, up the hills and down the valleys, al- 
ways in action, always contending with his stern 
but gracious antagonist, Nature, whose • strength 
and joy and beauty he sought steadfastly through 
the long process of the years to make his own, al- 
ways breathing the air in deep draughts and liv- 
ing out the days and the nights with a great ela- 
tion in his heart. What a noble objectivity there 
was in his thinking and in his living! Through 
habitual converse with the heather and the moors 
and the stars, he entered, day by day, deeper and 
deeper into their spaciousness and freedom; so 
that he was more a king camping with the gypsies 
in the dingle than any monarch upon his throne, 
however large his kingdom, however lustrous the 
jewels in his crown. 

Real health, health of body, health of mind, 
health of heart; the health that tingles, that glows, 
that leaps, that overflows with action and with joy, 
as a river at the flood overflows its banks; real 



OUTWARDNESS 177 

health as distinguished from the blanched sem- 
blance of health that modernity is seeking to find 
in the arcana of some mystical cult, a health which 
exults, not in the plenitude of its vigor, but in the 
absence of pain and freedom from aches — real 
health is to be found in the outer world, not merely 
in its diversions, its sports and its games, but, 
rather, through the contagion of the vitality and 
joy that abound in the wide spaces of the sky, in 
the rush of the breeze, in the soothing shade of 
the forest, in the lyric song of the running brook, 
in the measured beat of the ocean tides, in the 
blizzards that sweep the prairies, in the radiant 
light of the zenith sun by day and in the poetry, 
the repose, the mild splendor of the stars by night. 
As we must find sanity of mind and body in the 
outer world, so also in the outer world, with its 
immensity and its vagueness, in the omnipresence 
and puissance of its laws, in its illimitable power 
and life and beauty, must we find our spiritual 
inspiration. Spirituality is not an intellectual 
formula. It is not a decalogue. It is not a 
liturgy, however august. The Roman mass is the 
most consummate drama of worship that has ever 
emerged from the yearning, the aspiration, the 



178 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

contrition, the penitence and the adoration of the 
spirit of man prostrate before the Infinite. The 
Roman mass, however, though a noble aid to re- 
ligion, is not religion. We cannot put the spirit 
into words, phrases, prayers, liturgies. "The let- 
ter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." The tem- 
poral cannot contain the eternal. The relative 
cannot hold the absolute. The limited cannot em- 
brace the limitless. The moment we say the In- 
finite is here, or there, though it were present, it 
has vanished with our speaking, affrighted by our 
temerity. "Then if any man shall say unto you, 
'Lo, here is Christ, or there,' believe it not. 
Wherefore if they shall say unto you, 'He is in 
the desert,' go not forth. 'Behold He is in the 
secret chambers,' believe it not." These words, 
spoken by Jesus, though paradoxical, are wholly 
true. 

If the sacramentarian tell you that the Eternal 
is in the confessional, in penance, in apostolic suc- 
cession, in the infallible council of the church, or 
in the inerrable autocracy of a pope, "go thou not 
forth: He is not there." If the latitudinarian, 
the mystic, the Protestant tell you that He is in the 



OUTWARDNESS 179 

secret chambers, in the sanctuary of worship, in 
the Bible, in the mystical vision, in the transcend- 
ental rapture, in the ecstasy of prayer, "believe it 
not : He is not there." 

The spirit is an atmosphere : it is a divine vague- 
ness, a celestial aura that rests, an indefinable glory, 
upon land and sea, and that veils, with its eternal 
mystery, the features of life and love and beauty. 
The spirit is a vast emotion. It is the gentle pres- 
sure of the cosmic life upon our consciousness, our 
sensibilities and our love. We absorb the In- 
finite automatically, unconsciously, as we breathe 
in the air that sustains the life within our bodies. 
God reveals Himself to us and in us without 
articulation, without form or definition. We 
know Him without thinking. We sense Him 
without feeling. We love Him without being 
conscious of our love. We live and move and 
have our being in the Eternal, in the abysses of 
eternal love and goodness and beauty, as we live 
and move and have the being of our bodies in the 
atmosphere that enfolds the earth. He is the 
God of cloister and chapel and church, of prayer 
and fasting and penance. He is the God of the 



180 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

immensities of space. He is the God of the con- 
stellations. He is the God of the mountains, the 
open sky, the rivers and the oceans. He is the 
God of the clouds, the rain, the lightnings and the 
thunders. He is the God of the dawn and the 
sunset. He is the God of the ocean's threnody 
and of the forest's symphony. He is the light, the 
melody and the glory of the world. He is the love 
that moves, a vast and shoreless sea of flame and 
passion, through all the range and sweep of the 
universe to its uttermost boundaries. He is the 
center and the circumference, the source, the proc- 
ess and the goal of all being, the mystery of all 
life, from its feeblest breath to its full diapason 
among the celestial hosts. He is the beauty that 
streams toward us in an infinite largess from sun, 
planet, tree, meadow and flower. He is the march 
and music of the spheres. And if we would 
possess Him — the Eternal One, the Spirit of Life 
and of Love, the great Companion, vague and 
glorious to infinity — we must live out in Him; 
we must transcend the narrow confines of our own 
self -habitation and live in Him with a godlike 
emotion that overleaps all forms, definitions, syl- 
logisms, creeds, cults and churches; we must live 



OUTWARDNESS 181 

with the magnificent dignity of sonship in the 
vastness, the freedom and the light of God; and 
then He will be one with us, because we are one 
with Him. 



CHAPTER XIV 

PLAYING THE GAME 

In one of his essays, Huxley compares life to 
a game of chess, in which man is the protagonist 
and seated opposite to him is the great adversary, 
Destiny, silent, scrutinizing with searching eye 
every move that is made on the board, scrupulously 
fair and pitilessly exacting. There is an admir- 
able fitness in this simile. Life is a game. It is a 
contest between the wit, the zeal and the enterprise 
of man on the one side and the obduracy and hos- 
tility of circumstance on the other side, and the 
trophy is felicity. The game is always difficult, 
but, though our antagonist is wary and an adept, 
the chances of victory are with us, unless we be 
wholly spineless and inept. Destiny is more than 
willing to be checkmated, but surrenders only to 
those who bring boldness and expertness to the 
game. 

I suppose the deepest longing of our spirit is the 
longing for rest. We seek for the point of rest 

182 



PLAYING THE GAME 183 

in life as the eye seeks for the point of rest in a 
painting, the point in which all the motives and 
the details cohere and find their explanation. As 
the river moves toward the repose that awaits it 
in the profundities of the sea, so every thought 
and desire in us moves toward an ultimate equili- 
brium of spirit. And yet how strategic is the 
Providence that has ordained that the beatitude of 
inaction shall retreat with equal step before our 
advancing stride, as in the myth, so symbolic of 
life, Daphne ever recedes before the swift, pur- 
suing step of Apollo ! 

Destiny humors us as the prudent nurse humors 
the child who asks for the delicacy it should not 
have, by projecting the pleasure a little into the 
future. It is marvelously expert in the art of pro- 
crastination. It speaks to us at night, when we 
are weary of the fray and exhausted by the battle, 
saying, "Peace cometh in the morning." The con- 
summation devoutly to be wished always awaits 
us somewhere further along the way. Fortune is 
punctiliously honorable in the performance of her 
promise, but she believes in deferred payments. 
The word that leaps from her lips with the facility 
of long habit is "to-morrow." And when to- 



184 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

morrow comes, again it is "to-morrow" ! And 
when the morrow of to-morrow comes, still it is 
to-morrow" ! The Wandering Jew is a universal 
type. We are all in search of a paradise we never 
find. It is somewhere, but ever ahead of us, 
hidden behind the veil of distance and secreted in 
the vague deeps of futurity. We reach the tree 
and lift up our hand to pluck the fruit of our 
dreams, but our vision has deceived us — the fruit 
is not there; it has vanished, and we behold it 
hanging from a branch beyond our grasp. 

Life is not an oriental pleasure garden. It is an 
arena: it is a controversy, a strife, a battle; and 
it is this continuance of struggle, this stress of 
engagement, that constitutes our grandeur and our 
felicity. The strength of life is the exact equa- 
tion of the strength of its antagonisms. Our op- 
ponents are turned, through conquest, into our 
allies. Our resistances, when subjugated, become 
our coadjutors. We rise to the heights of vision 
on the rungs of conquered doubts. We evolve 
heroism out of the unpromising substance of mas- 
tered fears, as the flower, by the alchemy of its 
nature, evolves beauty and fragrance out of the 
black soil in which it grows. The epochal mo- 



PLAYING THE GAME 185 

ments of history are all moments of stupendous 
action. Erase the battles of Beth-horon, of Ai, 
of Salamis, of Marathon, of Milvian Bridge, of 
Tours, of Waterloo from the pages of history and 
we have erased everything that makes a civiliza- 
tion worthy of the name. We have erased the 
literature, the ethics and the religion of Israel. 
We have erased the philosophy, the oratory, the 
drama and the art of ancient Greece. We have 
erased the evangel, the morality, the inspiration, 
the hope, the religion and the church of Christ. 
And we have erased every paragraph, every phrase, 
every word of the world's history that speaks of 
the march of light, the growth of justice, the 
triumph of freedom and the ascent of the soul to- 
ward the Eternal. 

Man has won his divinity in the storms. He 
is never so great as when, with the sword of the 
spirit in hand, he is swept away in the passion 
and the fury of the strife. The spirit of man is 
ignominious when it reclines, a voluptuary, on 
the couch of ease, sunk in somnolence while the 
world is battling in the sweat of its brow for "a 
place in the sun." The most pernicious foes of 
mankind are the effeminate apostles of an emaS' 



186 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

culated philosophy of life, who speak smooth say- 
ings and who prophesy peace when there is no 
peace, and who weary the soul to the point of 
nausea with their flippant chatter about relaxation, 
repose and non-resistance, a non-resistance that is 
as immoral as it is invertebrate. The only repose 
that has in it any virtue, any nobility, is the repose 
that dwells in the heart of strife. The only 
calm that any man of royal mold would accept as 
guerdon is the calm that reigns, an angel of love- 
liness, in the heart of heroic action. And the 
only non-resistance that does not pronounce an 
indignant curse on its prophet and its disciple is 
the non-resistance that rules from the throne of 
honor. Man is never so superb as when he is con- 
tending, in the ferocity of a divine passion, for the 
luster of his manhood and the kingship of his 
soul. A tender, lyric charm envelops the Jesus 
who sat upon the Mount of the Beatitudes and 
opened His mouth, saying "Blessed are the meek, 
for they shall inherit the earth." However, the 
Jesus who awes, who exalts, who commands us is 
not the Jesus of the Beatitudes, but the Jesus who 
stood, a regal and magnificent presence, in the 
midst of the hostile multitude, and who, un- 



PLAYING THE GAME 187 

suborned by expediency and undismayed by fear, 
pronounced judgment upon the malefactors in 
high places, saying, "Woe unto you Scribes and 
Pharisees and Hypocrites, for ye devour widows' 
houses and for a pretense make long prayers ; there- 
fore, ye shall receive the greater damnation." 

The Beatitudes reveal to us the sweetness, the 
grace, the tenderness, the exquisite femininity of 
the heart of Jesus ; but the woes, the burdens, the 
anathemas, the judgments, the denunciations speak 
to us of His power, His courage, His masculine 
conscience, His majesty, His glorious, His Pro- 
methean divineness. The glory of this Man of 
mildness, of peace, waxes with the growing in- 
tensity and frenzy of the struggle. He is superb 
in the controversy with the powers of darkness, 
in the wilderness of the temptation. He is 
more superb in the august and bitter agony of 
Gethsemane. But He is most superb, most the 
perfect and consummate man, most manifestly the 
God, when He dies on Calvary alone, in the sor- 
row of a vast isolation, deserted by man and for- 
saken by the Infinite. How magnificently Jesus 
confirms, in life and in death, His virile, heroic 
words, "Think not that I am come to send peace 



188 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. 
The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,, and the 
violent taketh it by force." In these piping, 
singing, simpering days of the theorists of univer- 
sal peace, let us not forget that the Prince of Peace 
is the most martial figure in history, and that, clad 
in the armor of light and mailed in impenetrable 
holiness, he fought, a solitary combatant, with a 
divine prowess against the principalities of evil 
and the powers of sin. 

Life is, indeed, a game — a pressing, straining, 
bruising game. And we must play the game in 
a spirit of fairness. The law of the game is a 
just and equal reciprocity. Our antagonist is an 
adept and conversant with every move and re- 
source of the board. He will not surrender a 
bishop for a knight, or a queen for a rook. How- 
ever artful we may be, we shall never catch him 
napping and off guard. Though his eye seem to 
be averted and his attention for the moment dis- 
tracted, he is watching us; and he will exact the 
fullest price for every error, for every false move, 
whether it be the misplay of temerity or ignorance. 
Our invisible opponent is not only dexterous; he 
is severely cautious and intensely ethical. His 



PLAYING THE GAME 189 

plays are immediate and based on a parity of 
values. We cannot buy or sell on margins in the 
game of life. The heart of destiny is lavish, but 
the distribution of its treasures is regulated by a 
parsimony of justice that cannot be evaded by our 
strategy, or wheedled into leniency by our cajoler- 
ies, or commuted on the petition of our tears. It 
is not permitted to us, either by the honor of the 
game or the dexterity of our adversary, to reap in 
the future a knight for the gift of a pawn in the 
present. The exchange is an exchange in kind 
and of equivalent values. 

Nature is an infallible banker. She has evolved 
a system of accounts that excludes error with the 
absoluteness with which truth excludes falsehood. 
In her daybooks there are no lapses of accuracy, 
and on her ledgers the dividends that have been 
earned by the investments of the scholar or the 
saint are not credited to the gambler or the miser. 
Judas went with treachery and disloyalty in his 
heart to the treasury of the church for pelf. He 
sold himself for thirty pieces of silver. He earned 
his just dividend. He got the pelf he sought to 
assuage his avarice, with an added usury — shame 
for his disloyalty and ignominy for his turpitude. 



iqo EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Beethoven dedicated his noble gifts, his august 
genius, to the goddess of harmony. She rewarded 
him, not with the emoluments of material wealth, 
nor with the pleasant self -apotheosis that is the 
portion of immediate renown, nor with the in- 
toxicating praise of the satellites who do obeisance 
to those who dwell upon the heights of discerned 
achievement, but with the more glorious rewards of 
the Sonata Pathetique, the Sinfonia Eroica, Leo- 
nore, Egmont, the Appassionata and the Symphon- 
ies of fadeless power and deathless loveliness. 
His life was burdened with a degrading poverty, 
his great heart submerged in a squalor that deep- 
ened with his days and in a sorrow that grew 
more poignant with his years. But the goddess 
of his devotion did not fail him. She crowned 
him with honors beyond his dreams, with an im- 
mortality of glory beyond his most audacious 
hopes. 

Milton consecrated his stately powers — his cul- 
ture of rare catholicity and aristocratic fineness; 
his soaring imagination, which expatiated with 
large sweep of wing through the celestial spaces; 
his noble sense of form and academic chastity — 
to the priestess of poetry and the muse of verse. 



PLAYING THE GAME 191 

The divinity at whose shrine he worshiped did 
not bestow upon him the treasures of which she 
was not the custodian ; she did not crown him with 
the distinction of the voyager, the soldier, the 
courtier, or the statesman — with the honors of 
Drake, or Dampier, or Falkland, or Cromwell — 
she bestowed upon him a royal reward that was in 
kind one with his royal passion, the triumph and 
the renown of the poet. Measured by the canon 
of gold, "Paradise Lost" was a sorry perform- 
ance. Were we to capitalize Milton's gifts on the 
basis of the money value of five pounds, the sum 
paid for the greatest epic of modernity, Milton 
would represent an investment, an economic value 
to society, of one hundred English pounds, or five 
hundred American dollars. A wit once remarked 
to me, when I was commenting with some warmth 
of spirit on this indignity to one of the great ac- 
complishments in the world of literature, that he 
thought the price of five pounds for "Paradise 
Lost" was excessive; that it was just five pounds 
too much, according to his standards of literary 
value. The wit, though irreverent, spoke more 
judicially than he knew, for the soul which woos 
beauty in her perfect form and in her highest 



192 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

estate seeks no other recompense than her favor 
and her approbation. Beauty smiled upon Mil- 
ton, for, measured by the canon of art, "Paradise 
Lost" is one of the most notable achievements of 
epic literature. 

It were well for us to realize that our adversary 
is adroit and rigidly insistent upon the observance 
of the rules and ethics of the game. The knowl- 
edge that we are engaged in a contest in which 
equity is the referee, from whose decision there can 
be no appeal, would save many of us from biting 
disappointment and gnawing regret at the mo- 
ment when we are figuring up the total sum of our 
winnings and the final worth of our victory. 
There can be no atonement for past errors by a 
lucky shot, no reparation for past failures by a 
chance stroke of fortune. We say to our master- 
ful adversary, "We are playing the game for 
riches. We wish the power, the freedom, the mas- 
tery, the flattery, the luxury, the obsequiousness, 
the pleasures that follow in the footsteps of 
wealth." And if we play the game with assiduity, 
with patience, with caution and with skill, we 
shall win, with the certainty that the day succeeds 
the night, the stake for which we play; but we win 



PLAYING THE GAME 193 

just that stake, the stake of riches. We do not 
win culture. We do not win refinement. We 
do not win nobility of character. We do not win 
high and beautiful ideals of life. We do not 
win urbanity of mien. We do not win amenity 
of manners. We win the sovereignty of wealth 
and the scepter that goes with wealth — a scepter, 
as we know to our sorrow, consonant with every 
undesirable quality of character, with arrogance, 
brutality, vulgarity, pomposity, pretension, bovin- 
ity of mind and frigidity of heart. 

One might write an illuminative novel these 
days, whose theme would be the pathos of wealth 
— wealth with the pitiful blindness of ignorance, 
with the gaucherie of the parvenu, with a Rabel- 
aisian grotesqueness of mind and manner; a sort 
of human dinosaur, floundering in the vast spaces 
of an unmanageable and unenlightened opulence. 
The irony of life speaks its climacteric word in 
the rich of this earth who encircle themselves with 
art to whose beauties their eyes are blind, who in- 
dulge their passion for ostentation by filling their 
libraries with literature clothed in costly bind- 
ings, a literature whose deeper meanings and, alas ! 
whose superficial graces are hidden from their un- 



194 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

seeing eyes; and who, with the tastes and habits 
of their crude origin still clinging to them, as the 
mists cling to the mountain sides in the rainy sea- 
son, strive with a grotesque ardor to be at ease 
in the Zion of society, in which they are an in- 
congruity as striking as would be the song of the 
redbird in the throat of the raven. 

Again, we may play the game of life for the 
trophy of culture. It is a noble trophy and laden 
with blessings. It is a wonderful honor to walk 
with the men of light and leading, the great lum- 
inaries of the day, who have ennobled the world 
with their wisdom, enriched it with their idealism, 
softened it with their meditations and beautified 
it with the melody of their songs. These master 
spirits of the ages were rich only in the interior 
wealth that has no marketable value. Homer was 
rich in the imagination, the afflatus, the imagery, 
the harmony of song. Socrates was rich in rea- 
son, in wisdom, in dialectic, in character, in man- 
hood. Horace was rich in the graces of thought, 
in the perfections of form, in the felicities of 
phrase. Epictetus was rich in the treasures of 
the spirit, in the revelations of the over-world, 
in fortitude of will and in fineness of nature. But 



PLAYING THE GAME 195 

these great lords and rulers of mankind, and a 
thousand others who have reveled in and reflected 
the light of their wisdom and the beauty of their 
song, enjoyed no other guerdon than the light and 
the grace to which they had consecrated, with a 
noble self-abnegation, their talents and their en- 
thusiasm. Homer was blind and subject to the 
cheerless vicissitudes of the peripatetic bard. Soc- 
rates was poor and a vagrant. Epictetus was in- 
firm of body and a slave. Horace was dependent 
upon the bounty and the favor of Maecenas. And 
yet these mighty children of the light live on, 
while the memory of the lordly and the powerful 
chieftains, monarchs, merchants of their day has 
perished from the earth. 

It is a marvelous thought that you and I may 
live out our years in free and familiar associa- 
tion with these sovereign spirits of all ages and 
countries. We are stirred with pleasure by even 
a momentary contact with some minor author, his- 
torian, poet, essayist or novelist who comes from 
England or France to visit our country. If our 
imagination were of adult stature, what an intoxi- 
cation of joy would fill our heart as, day by day, 
we think of the privilege that is ours of sitting 



196 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

down in our study in companionship and in con- 
verse with the monarchs of thought, the aristocrats 
of the world of letters ! To live in their presence 
with a proper docility and a reverent responsive- 
ness means enrichment and benediction. If we 
are hospitable to their message and sensitive to 
their guidance, they will gladly share with us 
their grandeur, their renown of soul and the il- 
lumination of their truth. They will share with 
us, "without money and without price," their cul- 
ture, their refinement, their dignity, their toler- 
ance and their beauty. By the hammer of wis- 
dom and the chisel of truth, they will cut away 
the nodes and angles of our soul and will evoke, 
by the deftness of their sculpture, the symmetry, 
the fineness and the grace that are, by the decree 
of the Eternal, blessed latencies in every one of 
us. It was a felicity of definition born of a sub- 
tle instinct for the fitness and pertinency of things 
that gave to the great literature of the world its 
baptismal name, "Litterse humaniores." Litera- 
ture is humanizing. It emancipates us from the 
insularities of temperament, the dogmatisms of na- 
tionality, the prejudices of race and the bigotries 
of creed. It forms within us — not with precipi- 



PLAYING THE GAME 197 

tate haste, but with the noble deliberateness that 
is ever the way of wisdom, line by line, precept 
by precept, here a little and there a little — the 
catholic mind and the universal vision. With firm 
and gentle touch, it models the soul in lines of 
strength, dignity and charm. 

But if we make culture our summum bonum, 
we must not whimper, we must not murmur, over 
the meagerness of our fortune when our adversary 
bestows upon us the prize of the game. We 
must not accuse our antagonist of favoritism and 
call Fate a niggard because the invisible combat- 
ant against whom we have contended, while con- 
ceding to us the trophy of light we have sought 
and won, denies to us the trophy of wealth, with 
its power, its freedom, its luxury, its baronial 
houses, its magnificence, its hauteur, its liveries 
and its flunkies. The adversary allows us to nomi- 
nate our own stake, and the reward is with him 
to give unto us according to our preference, our 
taste, our genius, our skill in the game. And as 
it is the mark of a welsher to repudiate the wager 
he has made and lost, so it is the mark of a man 
— it is the sign of a real and upright sportsman 
in the game of life — to play with fortitude and 



198 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

fairness, and to accept with cheerfulness from the 
hand of Destiny, the silent player, the stipulated 
trophy, the stake we have nominated in the bond, 
whether it be the power and the comfort of riches 
or the dignity and the grace of intellectual cul- 
ture. 

It is also an imperative requirement of victory 
that we go into the strife with an invincible as- 
surance in our heart, with the joy of the hazard 
of the game pulsing in our blood. The spirit is 
the winning factor in every sphere of effort, in 
the gymnasium, in the sports of the field, in the 
athletics of business, in literature, in art, in the 
forum, in the church. The spirit is the gist and 
marrow of all achievement. It is the push and 
the pull of all conquest. It is the soul of courage 
and the vital pith of the will. The spirit sur- 
mounts all obstacles, however difficult; overcomes 
all resistances, however obdurate, with the noble 
ease with which the buzzard, when a storm is 
raging, without a stroke of its wings, without a 
flutter of a feather, will soar from height to height 
to revel in the glare of the lightning, the rush 
of the wind and the torrent of the rain. The mo- 
tionless triumph over mountain and valley, over 



PLAYING THE GAME 199 

space and storm, by the buzzard is hidden from 
the curious eye of science. Its mastery is the se- 
cret of the buzzard. The overcoming power of 
the spirit likewise evades the penetrative vision of 
psychology. It is a mystery. It is cryptic in its 
essence. It is esoteric in its processes. It dwells 
in the nerve, the imagination, the will of one man 
and he sweeps on, as in the arms of the wind, to- 
ward his goal. Another man, confident in his own 
genius, declines the spirit's inspirations and, how- 
ever richly he may be endowed with the proper- 
ties of health and strength and the powers of the 
intellect, however bounteously he may be favored 
with propitious circumstances, he limps and stag- 
gers over his burden and finally sinks, defeated, by 
the wayside. The spirit is the one element of 
caprice in destiny. It is not of the stuff and sub- 
stance of our being; it is not of the constitution 
of personality: it is a power not ourselves; it is 
the God within, who visits us only on our invita- 
tion and who stays only by our insistence. "The 
wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the 
sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh 
and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born 
of the spirit." 



200 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

The great career of Wellington, a career of un- 
broken successes and uninterrupted victories, is 
not explained by the preeminency of his martial 
gifts. He was not comparable in the reach and 
intuition of intellect, in the energy, the strategy, 
the tactics of warfare, with his illustrious antago- 
nist. Wellington was the conqueror of Napoleon, 
not because he was more versed in the wisdom and 
the technique of the game, but, rather, for the rea- 
son that he was rich in that which counts more 
than genius, more than circumstance, more than 
efficiency, in the final victory — the power, the 
passion, the enthusiasm of the spirit. 

John Wesley was, if measured by the standard 
of sheer intellectuality, of academic culture and 
religious scholarship, or by the standard of the 
mass and cogency of personality, or by the stand- 
ard of the power and mastery of eloquence, a 
minor figure in the Anglican Communion. In 
equipment of faculty, in the compass, the enlarge- 
ment and the polish of learning, he cannot be 
ranked in the same category with men of the stamp 
of John Smith, Nathanael Culverwel, Isaac Bar- 
row and John Tillotson. Yet "The Select Dis- 
courses" of Smith, "The Elegant and Learned Dis- 



PLAYING THE GAME 201 

course on the Light of Nature" of Culver wel, the 
prose of Barrow — the most magnificent and stately 
prose of a day when writing was an art and not 
a profession — and the suave, Ciceronian eloquence 
of Tillotson are known only to the few students 
who detour into the solitudes of literature, while 
the beat of Wesley's heart is felt to the farthest 
limits of our planet, wherever the pioneers of 
Christianity, the missionaries of the cross, have 
gone. The explanation of Wesley's remarkable 
domination of the religious thought of his age, 
and all succeeding ages, is that he was aglow with 
the inspiration that gives universality to whatever 
medium it inhabits, whether it be the hymn, 
"Nearer, My God, to Thee," of Sarah Flower 
Adams, the song of Baroness Nairne, "Land o' 
the Leal," Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations 
of Immortality," "In Verdure Clad" by Haydn, 
"The Melody in F" by Rubinstein, the Potion mo- 
tive in "Tristan and Isolde," or the Spear motive 
in "Parsifal" — the inspiration of the spirit, the 
spirit of mystery and of power; the spirit that is 
in us, but not of us; the spirit without whose fire 
and heat and conflagration our gift is like a jewel 
without the light of the sun to evoke its color 



202 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

and its beauty, like a body uninhabited, unener- 
gized and unillumined by a soul. 

It is the spirit that conquers. It is the divine 
gusto that drives us on, that sustains us when 
we are weary, that cheers us when we are dis- 
couraged, that urges the steel home to its mark 
in the blow that wins success. It is the impulsion 
of the talent. It is the sovereign of circumstance. 
It sings in Milton's soul, an apostrophe to light, 
out of the black abysm of the night in which his 
vision was forever imprisoned. It floods the heart 
of Cervantes with the light of its inspirations and 
the sunglow of its hopes, and he conceives and 
gives body and form to Don Quixote de la Mancha, 
who, though gestated and fashioned in the gloom 
and the shadow of the prison, has brought an 
amused smile to the lips and gayety to the hearts 
of all who have followed him in his wild ideal- 
isms, in his grotesque adventures with his fair 
and beauteous Dulcinea, his furious and disastrous 
engagement with the windmill, his fantastical 
dreams, his tipsy Utopias, his delicious oddities of 
ambition and of enterprise. It fortifies, with a 
celestial indomitability, the heart of Paul, the 
Apostle of the Gentiles, exalting his zeal and mag- 



PLAYING THE GAME 203 

nifying his courage as the struggle grows in se- 
verity and violence. His apostolate was an 
Odyssey of perils on land and sea, of woes, of in- 
dignities, of scourgings, of castigations, of scoff - 
ings, of insults, heartaches and tears ; but he lived 
and labored and founded churches in Corinth, in 
Ephesus, in Thessalonica, in Rome, in the various 
cities of Phrygia, Cilicia, Galatia, in Macedonia 
and Greece; he suffered; he died, a conqueror — 
and more than a conqueror — because he was filled, 
urged on, coerced, inner ved by the spirit, the 
mighty combatant who rules destiny, as the sun 
rules the day. 

If we would play the game of life; if we would 
play it in the great way; if we would play it 
with a splendid dash and a fine abandon; if we 
would smite with vigor, and when smitten in re- 
turn murmur not over the ill fortune of battle 
and complain not because of the stress of our foe 
and the pain of our wounds; if in the moment of 
seeming defeat we would strike with a courage 
and a force born of the assurance of ultimate vic- 
tory; if we would have faith in the dayspring 
even when the shadows of the night are falling; 
if we would play the game, the glorious, divine 



204 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

game of life, not as cravens, as slackers, as shirk- 
ers, but as men, valiant men and royal sportsmen, 
as the saints, visible or invisible, as the heroes, 
illustrious or obscure, of every age and every land, 
have played it, with eclat, with audacity, with a 
glow in the heart, with the fire and ardor of vic- 
tory in our blood — then we must contend against 
our strong and subtle adversary, not only with the 
might of our talent, but in the white heat of the 
spirit — the spirit that is to man what the sun 
is to the earth, life, light, splendor, triumph! 



CHAPTER XV 

PRESENTNESS 

The saying of Wordsworth, "The child is the 
father of the man," is a paradox as true as it is 
striking. It is one of those flashes of genius that 
at first bewilder us by their temerity and then il- 
lumine us by their veridicalness. The child is 
the father of the man in his perfect hour of nor- 
mality. The normal man in the early forenoon 
of life is simple, natural, self-expressive, uncon- 
strained by expediency in his affections and un- 
deterred in speech, in manner and in conduct by 
petty circumspections. These are all qualities of 
childhood in efflorescence. 

The man whose spiritual consciousness has not 
been impaired by voluptuousness of habit, the de- 
generate issue of an obese prosperity, or by a cyni- 
cal materiality of intellect, often the sequent of 
penury of fortune, is, in the full noon of his 
powers, his splendidly vital days, intensely mys- 
tical and ardently addicted to the supernatural. 

205 



206 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Whether he be a theist, a deist, a pantheist, or an 
agnostic, he feels within him a hunger, an inap- 
peasable affinity, for the Eternal. His spirit is a 
vast interrogation. He implores the Sphinx, the 
silent one, the custodian of the secrets of earth 
and sky, to solve the riddles so alluring and so 
elusive, the riddles of matter and spirit, of con- 
sciousness and self -consciousness, of life and love, 
of suffering and death, of the why and the whence 
and the whither. And though the Sphinx answer 
not, undismayed by the frigid silence, he ceases 
not, in the privacy of his soul, to importune the 
mute guardian of the everlasting mystery, and 
waits, with a brave hope in his heart, for the so- 
lution of the great enigma. The supernatural is 
also the native element of childhood. The early 
days are days of marvel — days lived in a mystical 
world of fancy and imagination, a world every- 
where invaded by the miraculous and quivering 
with the spirit of wonder, a world of genii and 
elves and fairies and goblins, in which Jack the 
Giant Killer, Prince Charming, Little Red Riding- 
hood and Cinderella are as vivid and as real as 
are the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Launce- 
lot, Sir Galahad, Sir Gawain and Sir Percival, 



PRESENTNESS 207 

with their marvelously caparisoned steeds, their 
terrific combats, their spectacular tournaments at 
Caerleon, King Arthur's court, to the chivalrous 
imagination of youth. 

But I think perhaps the most remarkable wis- 
dom of life that emerges out of the nascent in- 
stinct of childhood for the guidance of our ma- 
turity is to be found in its practicalness, in the 
presentness of its faculties and interests. The 
child lives in the immediate sensation and in the 
actual environment. To the sensibility and con- 
sciousness of the dawn of our day, life is centered 
in the proximate and concrete, and not in some 
remote, abstract world — in the substantial pleas- 
ure of the moment, and not in the insubstantial 
pleasure of futurity. The child understands 
neither the logic of deferred felicity nor the wis- 
dom of subordinating the lesser, present pleas- 
ure to the larger, distant pleasure. In the nur- 
sery with its dolls; in its wild flight over moor 
and dale and meadow; in the competition and joy 
of its games ; in its urgency to action ; in its clamor 
for adventure; in its passion for freedom; in its 
appetency for life, for sympathy, for comrade- 
ship, for love — the kingdom of heaven is ever at 



208 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

hand for the child. It lives in its minute, but 
intensely actual, world with the full impact of 
its senses and the undiminished energy of its soul. 
With a vivid immediateness of desire it invests 
the whole wealth and content of its being in the 
proximate experience, in the present delight. 

This presentness of thought and interest is the 
unfailing mark of perfect normality. The man 
who lives in largest amplitude, in fullest opulence, 
in highest efficiency, is the man who lives with 
most entire concentration of his powers in the 
experience, the problem and the situation with 
which he is at each moment confronted. The day 
of salvation is always now. Life is fugitive, and 
so is opportunity. We must catch the felicities 
of life on the wing. "Day unto day uttereth 
speech." The transient eloquence of to-day 
which has escaped our hearing by reason of inat- 
tention cannot be recovered, even if in the zeal 
of contrition we listen with a more devout intent- 
ness to the eloquence that may fall from the lips 
of the morrow. The time spirit never repeats 
the same counsel of wisdom with the same tone 
of voice and with quite the same emphasis. The 
word that was spoken years ago with the gentle- 



PRESENTNESS 209 

ness of love and which, through absence of spirit, 
we heard not, and therefore could not heed, may 
return to us in the reverberations of appalling thun- 
der. It is Novalis, I think, who says, with a fine 
pregnancy of phrase, "Light rejected returns as 
lightning." If we listen with docility and rever- 
ence to the ministry of the day as it sweeps by 
us on swift wings in its unceasing flight, it will 
speak to us in soft tones, with its own sweet ca- 
dence, words of light and kindliness. But if, 
through heedlessness, we are inhospitable, the lost 
counsel will, upon some future day, return to us 
in the form of judgment and of penance. 

The opportunities of life are as countless as 
the grains of sand upon the seashore, but they 
are never recurrent. The deed of commission is 
a positive permanency. What is written is writ- 
ten. The deed of omission is a negative perma- 
nency. The lost chance, the lost day, the lost hour, 
the lost vision, the lost love, is gone, and forever 
gone. The recovery of the scorned beatitude lies 
as far beyond the command of our will as the dog 
star Sirius lies beyond the touch of our finger 
tips. Each experience that comes to us is less 
potent with benefactions of power, of joy, of vie- 



210 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tory, because of antecedent experiences that we 
have ignored and wasted through dispersion of 
thought and absence of interest. Time is not af- 
forded us in this busy, hurrying world — with its 
boundless content of energy, knowledge, beauty, 
life, felicity, pressing constantly against every 
nerve and sensibility in us and seeking entrance 
into the inner recesses of our spirit — for dodder- 
ing reminiscence in the realm of past experiences, 
or for idle vaticination concerning the world that 
is to be. We carry our past to its highest expres- 
sion of service and we most perfectly insure the 
realization of the Utopia which lies buried in the 
unsearchable deeps of the future, and of which 
we all dream in our prophetic hours, by living 
with a noble fullness of faculty, a splendid virility 
of purpose, an eager, vibrant joy, in the present 
— the present moment, the present fortune and the 
present world. 

We impose an incalculable burden of unrest 
upon our spirits by the wanderlust of ambition, 
which deserts the actual achievement and the real 
happiness of the hour at hand to roam aimlessly 
in the faithless world of inordinate anticipation, 



PRESENTNESS 211 

in the visionary riches and the phantom victories 
of an intoxicated self-importance. Ambition is 
not only a stern overseer, exacting the ultimate 
ounce of our strength and the last drop of our 
blood; it is also a shabby and treacherous pay- 
master. It rewards with parsimony and betrays 
with prodigality. It is more than the peer of in- 
dolence in the destruction of life and the subver- 
sion of happiness; for if its victims be fewer in 
number, they are of immeasurably greater worth. 
Indolence is the vice of little souls. Ambition is 
the vice of large souls. And because ambition is 
the vice of large souls, the doom that waits upon 
its perfidy is so much more catastrophic than the 
ignoble distress that dogs the step of indolence. 
Ambition is more often the crucifixion than it 
is the coronation of the talent. It is not an ex- 
cellence; it is an infirmity of human nature to 
project too far, and with too great frequency, the 
vision of the intellect and the enthusiasm of the 
heart beyond the present — which, on account of 
the intricacy of its problems and the arduousness 
of its tasks, has need of our talents in their high- 
est efficiency and their greatest intensity — into the 



212 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

triumph of the future — a triumph which, in the 
great majority of instances, is as spectral as the 
dream in which it has its origin. 

I have in mind a dear friend of my early days, 
whose heart was as fair as summer, whose soul 
was, in the virtue of personal honor, as white as 
snow, but whose career, just at the hour when its 
task seemed nobly and finely accomplished, cul- 
minated in a tragedy of dishonor, like the sun 
which has swept through the tranquil sky of a 
perfect day to couch in the fuliginous heart of 
the storm that hovers, angry and menacing, be- 
yond the western horizon. His life in the busi- 
ness world, in the church, in the home, was a theme 
of general comment because of the loftiness of his 
ideals and the fine texture of his conduct. His 
great heart so abounded in love, so overflowed with 
the virtue of kindness, that there was no room 
in it to harbor a petty vice, a mean desire, an ig- 
nominious purpose. His record, in the high quali- 
ties of manhood, integrity, fortitude, fealty and 
chivalry, was untarnished by a fault and unsul- 
lied by the stain of a single infirmity. He was 
loved by those privileged to know him with the 
intimacy of friendship, and in the revealing pri- 



PRESENTNESS 213 

vacy of the life of the home, with a love, so far 
as my observation goes, unique in the qualities of 
loyalty and fervor. And yet this great spirit made 
his exit from the stage of time shadowed with 
an infamy that had its incitement in an ambition 
too vast for his powers and too subtle for his 
talents. I instance this catastrophe that overtook 
a nature fitted by its rich endowment of virtues 
and exquisite qualities of mind and heart for a 
worthy accomplishment and an honorable des- 
tiny, because it is typical, because I believe that 
intemperate expectancy is the invisible curse that 
dims, far beyond the measure of our knowing, the 
luster of integrity and blights the joy of the 
heart. 

That man is favored by the gods who learns 
that the real success of life is far more an affair 
of the fine mechanism and the presentness of per- 
sonality than an affair of the mass and the spec- 
tacularity of the enterprise in which he is en- 
gaged. There is a notable beauty in the ambi- 
tion that proportions the task to the talent, and 
that realizes its dream in sweet sobriety amid 
modest circumstances and manageable conditions. 

The victorious men are not the men who, by 



214 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

a certain mundane quality of genius, finesse of 
temperament and fortuity of situation, command 
a large space in the admiration and the en- 
terprise of the world. The victorious men 
are the men who work with the power, the 
passion and the presentness of genius in what- 
ever sphere may be allotted to them, whether large 
or small, whether the bench of the cobbler or the 
forum of the orator, whether a garret or a man- 
sion, whether grinding lenses or carving a statue, 
whether the Portiuncula at Assisi or the Duomo at 
Florence. 

George Herbert, though noble born and illus- 
trious among the distinguished by the patent of 
a long and famed ancestry, devoted his gifts to 
the church and lived his latter days in the soli- 
tude and obscurity of the parish of Wilts in Eng- 
land. His labors in the diminutive parish church 
at Bemerton were brief — brief as the days of the 
public ministry of his Master, whom he loved with 
the love of a great consecration. He pondered 
upon the divine mysteries in silence. He intoned 
the liturgy of his devotion withdrawn from the 
world. He communed with the Eternal amid 
the solitude of his church and in the yet pro- 



PRESENTNESS 215 

founder solitude of his heart. And how wonder- 
ful were his thoughts, how tender the melody and 
the message of his song! What a divinity rests 
forever upon his words, his spirit and his pres- 
ence! He lived in loneliness and in presentness 
with the church. He lived in retirement and in 
presentness with his parishioners, singing the song 
of the nightingale to an audience of sparrows. 
He lived in obscurity and presentness with God. 
And yet he is the most visible, the most outstand- 
ing, the most revered figure in the national church 
of the England of his age. Who wore the pur- 
ple in his day? Who were the bishops who ruled 
over the sees of Salisbury, Ely, Lincoln, Durham, 
Worcester, London? Who were the bishops of 
the bishops, the archbishops of Canterbury and 
York? Who were the celebrated divines, the 
canons, the deans, the prebendaries that preached 
the gospel of "Jesus Christ and Him crucified," 
surrounded by the pomp and encircled by the 
fashion of the times, in the cathedrals of St. Paul 
and Westminster; the doctors of divinity who 
taught in the universities of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge? They are all unremembered, lost in the 
unread pages of history. But George Herbert 



216 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

lives for all time in his "Sacred Poems and Pri- 
vate Ejaculations," in the gentle, pensive, brood- 
ing divinity of his "Priest to the Temple." 

Again, we have an illuminative example of the 
power of the talent to affirm itself with a splen- 
did fullness of energy despite the constriction of 
the space assigned to it by fortune in the stable 
fame and the wide renown of Matthew Arnold. 
It would be difficult to duplicate in the history 
of modern letters a more pathetic disproportion be- 
tween the majesty of the gift and the meagerness 
of the opportunity than we observe in the life 
of Arnold, who maintains with the ease of genius 
the position of primacy among the critics of Eng- 
land. It makes one question, not only the jus- 
tice, but even more the sanity of the world, when 
one thinks of this great, sensitive spirit, inspired 
with ideals of art and of life whose exceeding 
fineness gave them a cutting edge, wasting the 
priceless treasure of his talents in catechising the 
children of the board schools of Great Britain 
concerning the puerilities of geography, of history, 
of grammar. His valiant heart often must have 
quivered with indignation when he contrasted the 
riches which an uncritical spirit awarded to medioc- 



PRESENTNESS 217 

rity as its portion with the indigence that destiny- 
assigned as the appropriate and just recompense 
for his superlative gift of literary criticism, the 
high, far-sweepings vision of his spirit, the finished 
grace of his verse and the subtle charm of his 
prose. 

But doubtless there is a divine method in the 
madness of destiny and in the purblindness of man 
to the presence and the majesty of talent. The 
rewards of riches, the luxury of recognition and 
applause, the splendor of entourage — these are not 
the vital things: these do not constitute the ulti- 
mate greatness of the soul: these do not crown 
the talent and the work of man with a distinction 
that survives the passing day. The delicacy of 
the mechanism of our gift, the presentness of fac- 
ulty, passion and interest — these are the matters 
of supreme importance : these are the indispensable 
elements of the great life : these are the unfailing 
conditions of a high, a noble, a permanent suc- 
cess. This is the immortality of Matthew Arnold. 
He met life; he met literature; he met truth; he 
met duty; he met the apocalypse of nature and 
the ministry of beauty with an exquisite fineness 
of faculty, with a noble presentness of enthusiasm 



218 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

— the pristine, naive enthusiasm of the child. 
And his reward, though less convenient and less 
easily convertible into the comfort of life than 
was the portion of many of lesser endowment in 
his day, is more enduring. His terrestrial king- 
dom was the kingdom of a journeyman; his stipend 
was the stipend of a banker's clerk; but his gift 
was the gift of a master, and he wears the crown 
of a just celebrity. He belongs with the hierarchy 
of the leaders, and his renown touches the cir- 
cumference of the world of culture. The great 
lesson of inspiration that we learn from the lives 
of George Herbert and Matthew Arnold, and the 
lives of countless others of the great, though un- 
rewarded, spirits of this world, is that the dig- 
nity and the beauty of life are not conditioned 
by the magnitude of the undertaking, or by the 
emolument of riches or popularity, but by fine- 
ness of faculty and immediacy of interest. 

Furthermore, if we would live with the fullest 
power and the largest consequence, it is impera- 
tive that we should live in the actual world with 
directness of vision and presentness of interest. 
As we dissipate the force and waste the opportun- 
ity of life by inordinate anticipation, so we ex- 



PRESENTNESS 219 

haust the vigor of the soul's impact and impair 
the serviceableness of our talents by our intem- 
perate idealisms. We may be so absent in our 
dreams, our theories, our heaven-kissing transcen- 
dentalism, as to unfit ourselves for rational con- 
tact with the actual problems — the problems of 
poverty, of ignorance, of suffering, of vice, of 
crime, of moral anarchy, of militancy — that con- 
front us on this earth wherever we turn. We may 
bathe our sword so long in the light of the eterni- 
ties that our arm becomes palsied by the weight 
of our weapon, and our light-bathed sword be- 
comes useless because of the suspended function 
of the arm that should wield it on behalf of 
humanity and God in the furious combat that is 
forever waging between the angels of light and 
the powers of darkness. We may become so in- 
ebriated with the light air of the towering peaks 
of thought that, like a man reeling with excess of 
wine, we can no longer coordinate our faculties 
and adjust our interests to life as we find it at 
the base of the hills. 

One of the most pernicious foes of human well- 
being is the dreamer who absents himself from 
the storm and stress, the strain and din of bat- 



220 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tie, the hunger and thirst of the world, and who 
lives on the heights, wasting the divine forces of 
his spirit in star gazing, in spinning out of his 
dream-drunk imagination theories of redemption 
that might have pertinency in relation to the 
ethereal denizens of the sun, but which have no 
pertinency whatever in relation to the flesh-bur- 
dened, the poverty-ridden, the passion-driven, the 
matter-crazed humanity of this earth. Extremes 
meet. The most obdurate resistants of the spirit 
of progress are separated by the width of the 
world, the idealists of holiness and the realists of 
evil — the realists of evil, who are so habituated 
to the soot and the grime of the lowlands that 
they will not climb the mountain sides to en- 
noble their spirits with the vision of the eternities 
which greet us only when we stand upon the 
heights ; the idealists of holiness, who are so over- 
whelmed with the splendor and the beauty of the 
mountain top, so entranced with the grace and 
the glory of the dream, so drugged with the inertia 
of the beatific vision, that when they return to 
the real world, the world of actual men and 
women, of actual hunger and need, of actual sor- 
row and strife, of actual travail and suffering and 



PRESENTNESS 221 

sin, they wander about, listless and supine, the 
power of redemption wholly gone out of them. 
As the strength fled from the muscles and sinews 
of Samson when his locks were shorn, they have 
been unmanned by the Delilah of the rhapsodical 
dream. 

The ideal is the heaven of the soul. It is our 
redemption. It is the force of levitation that 
lifts us high about the dissonances, the anarchies 
and the vulgarities that smother the life and 
shadow the joy of the soul, and that brings us 
into concord with the light and beauty of the In- 
finite. Man never rises above the elevation that 
his spirit reaches in its highest hour of visitation. 
The ideal is our savior in every realm of life. It 
is the savior of the intellect. It is the savior of 
the conscience. It is the savior of the heart. It 
is the savior of the soul of beauty, in fiction, in 
sculpture, in speech, in song, in symphony, in wor- 
ship and in the more practical matter of conduct. 
The ideal is to the art and the practice of life 
what the sky is to the earth, its light, its inspira- 
tion, its freedom, its joy and its loveliness. 

But if we lose ourselves in the slumbrous in- 
toxication of the ideal; if we drink too frequently 



222 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

from the cup of nectarial dreams, our dreams will 
become a judgment and our ideals a scourge. 
Habituated to the cold, clear light of culture, to 
the refinements and the chastities of the highlands 
of thought, where the gods of wisdom and the 
goddesses of beauty dwell, we shall lose all power 
of contact with the crude, the angular, the unil- 
lumined of this earth who most need our light 
and our inspiration. Our culture will desocialize 
us and bereave us of those qualities of simplicity 
and affability which fit us for communion with 
our kind. Blinded by the splendor of the celes- 
tial vision, as the eye is blinded by the effulgence 
of the summer sun; dazed by long and habitual 
communion with forbidden mysteries, with the 
cryptic, the esoteric, the occult ; hypnotized by the 
mystic influences of the over-world, our strength 
eviscerated, our sanity menaced, our faculties dis- 
mantled by the narcotic of other-worldliness, when 
we return to earth again, we return not to en- 
lighten and to bless; we return as incapacitated 
for rational and effective service, to fulfill the di- 
vine office of redeemer of mankind, as would be 
a Dives who should speak with eloquence to the 
poor of the blessings of poverty, as would be an 



PRESENTNESS 223 

archangel robed in the garments of an unblem- 
ished holiness who should speak to the sin-stained 
combatants of earth of the joys of temptation and 
the sweetness of moral strife. 

We do not enlighten; we bewilder the world 
with our mystical theologies, our transcendental 
systems, cults, moralities, therapeutics, our elysi- 
ums of perfect health and our Utopias of uni- 
versal happiness. We are indigenous to this 
planet and we cannot, without disloyalty to our 
high calling, be long absent from the body. It 
is no doubt our high and blessed privilege, as 
"children of the light," to converse upon occa- 
sions, in the sabbatic moods of the soul, with the 
spiritualities of the over-world, to lave our minds 
and hearts in the pure and tranquil waters of the 
Infinite. During this brief day of mortality, how- 
ever, it is our major concern, our dominant obliga- 
tion, with slightly interrupted permanency, to be 
present in the body, to make the solid earth our 
theater of action and the heart of humanity our 
cathedral of worship. In order to attain the high- 
est consummation of our powers, we must make 
intermittent flights on the wings of the spirit into 
the heights to commune with the poets of science, 



224 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of history, of music and of song, and with all the 
lords of light who dwell in magisterial grandeur on 
Mount Parnassus ; to commune with the seers and 
the psalmists, who reign in a splendor of immor- 
tality upon Mount Zion; to commune with the 
presences of light and loveliness, with the adepts 
of the occult, with the dreamers and the mystics, 
and, above all, with the arch-mystics, the supreme 
initiates of wisdom, the sovereign redeemers of 
the ages. But we may not abide long upon the 
heights of vision and of rapture without imperil- 
ing our sanity and dwarfing the faculties that cor- 
relate us with the labors, the burdens, the doubts, 
the fears, the sorrows, the tears, the bitter and 
the sweet actualities of this earth "that groaneth 
in travail until now, waiting for the redemption 
of its body." 

We are, by the decree of the Eternal, in con- 
junction, for this terrestrial incarnation at least, 
with matter, with the sights and sounds of the 
physical earth, with forest and field and sea and 
sky; with man — man in his poverty, suffering, 
struggle, life and death. And if we would, with 
a divine self-sacrifice and a noble heroism, do our 
part in lifting this planet, with its priceless freight- 



PRESENTNESS 225 

age of humanity, nearer to its ideal destiny, nearer 
to the perfection we behold in our dreams on the 
mountain top, nearer to the white eternities, nearer 
to God, we must, in imitation of the great Mas- 
ter, after our high moments of transfiguration upon 
the peaks, descend to the base of the hill and make 
the actual world our permanent dwelling place. 
With a glorious presentness of vision and of ef- 
fort, we must illumine the darkness of the world 
with the light of our spirits and mitigate the bur- 
dens and the sorrows of humanity with gracious 
deeds and tender ministries born of the love of 
our heart. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 

It is strange that love, the supreme sanctity, 
should not only be denied its rightful priority, 
but that it should even be denied position among 
the sacraments of Christianity. The confession 
of sin has been thought worthy the honors of a 
sacrament. The prayers of the penitent and the 
contritions of the sinner are of such admirable and 
divine holiness as to crown penance with sacra- 
mental dignity. But, according to the standards 
of divinity, both in the Romanist and the Protest- 
ant communions, love, though the first-born of 
the Infinite, belongs with the secularities. Our 
contritions, our tears, our dirges are sacrosanct and 
merit, by reason of their superfine spirituality — 
a spirituality, I imagine, proportioned to their 
dismalness — primacy among the virtues of the 
church. Love, however, may not be ranked 

among the virtues deserving canonization. It has 

226 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 227 

no right to consort with the holy things, accord- 
ing to the ethics of Romanism. It has no habita- 
tion in the heart of God, if we should take one of 
the most important symbols of Protestant Chris- 
tianity as our instructor in the wisdom of the 
Eternal. The Westminster confession of faith, 
in its definition of God, shows its reverence for 
love as an attribute of divinity by bestowing upon 
it the sad emphasis of exclusion. The Westmin- 
ster divines, however truculent may have been their 
hatred of the theology, the ceremonialism, the 
monastic orders and the papacy of Rome, were of 
entire oneness of mind with their bitter ecclesiasti- 
cal antagonist in scorning the claim of love to be 
enrolled among the divinities. Love has lived 
out its bleak and lusterless days, a modest and 
veiled presence, in the obscure corners of Chris- 
tian theology and in the somber crypts of the 
Christian church. This fair-visaged, gracious, 
soft-voiced angel of the eternities has suffered an 
equality of indignity from monk and presbyter. 
The excellencies and charms of love have, in every 
age, been more venerated by the pagan muse of 
Parnassus than by the haloed saint of Zion. 
This scorn of the highest virtue of divinity is 



228 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

one of the impenetrable enigmas of the psychology 
of the church, since Christ, its founder, was Him- 
self the incarnation of the spirit of love. The 
fatuity with which the church has contemned love 
as a revelation of God and as a force for the ex- 
altation and enthronement of humanity will be, 
to future ages, one of the wonders of the world. 
The church is, without question, of all institutions 
that bear upon the culture and well-being of man- 
kind, the institution the most benign in its mis- 
sion, and the most vital evangel of the ideals and 
the ethics that make for the perfection and the 
felicity of life. But one marvels, with a perplex- 
ity of mind that deepens with reflection, over its 
credulity and incredulity, its faith in ceremonial 
theurgy and the magic of dogma; its unfaith in 
love, the meek redeemer, the power of God unto 
salvation, the mighty conqueror of mankind. The 
magistracy of the church over the hearts and the 
consciences of men is the outstanding miracle of 
time. In its parsimony of love, it has wounded 
the heart of God; and yet, notwithstanding its dis- 
loyalty to the spirit of love, the imperium in im- 
perio, the divinity within divinity, it has com- 
manded the reverence and the devotion of men. 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 229 

However, "the hour of redemption draweth 
nigh." Love, with soft and persistent step, is 
moving toward its own kingdom. The honors 
of the sacrament denied by the priesthood of the 
church are, progressively, being conferred upon it 
by the one priesthood which officiates in the pre- 
rogatives of an apostolate derived, not from an an- 
cient bishop, but from the Ancient of days, the 
priesthood of humanity. The process of canoniza- 
tion is going steadily forward in school, in church 
and in state, in letters, in jurisprudence, in poli- 
tics, in art, in religion and in worship; and in due 
time, at no distant day, our queen of love, our 
madonna of the eternities, will rule in absolute 
sway over her proper empire, the heart of man- 
kind. 

Love is religion. It is the center and the cir- 
cumference, the warp and woof, the essence and 
the substance, of divinity. A great seer, an adept 
in the mysteries hidden from the ordinary vision 
of mortals, by long and intimate converse with 
eternal things through prayer and meditation, tells 
us — and his words find confirmation in our hearts 
through an apprehension more divine than the 
logic of the intellect — that God is love. This 



230 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

succinct revelation is the final word of the Eternal 
to humanity, and it is pregnant with unutterable 
ministries of light and life and hope. It banishes, 
with a ruthless logic, the notion that God is a 
metaphysical theorem and that salvation is synony- 
mous with an intellectual assent to a scholastic 
definition. 

The church has taught and acted on the as- 
sumption that religion is as exclusively an affair 
of the pure intellect as geometry or astronomy. 
The theology of Romanist and Protestant alike is 
founded on the determinations of reason, and not 
on the emotions of the heart — with this differ- 
ence, that the intellectualism of Rome is more 
magnanimous than the intellectualism of Geneva, 
or of Augsburg. The Protestant church says to 
the individual communicant, "You must believe 
in the divinity of Christ." If the communicant 
answer, "This mystery is beyond my understand- 
ing: it is too deep for me," the church of the 
Reformation still insists upon the intellectual af- 
firmation of this dogma by the communicant. 
The Protestant church is wholly logical in the in- 
exorableness of its command because, according to 
its frigid interpretation of Christianity, redemp- 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 231 

tion is founded upon an intellectual formula. 
The church of Rome says to its candidate for con- 
firmation, "You must believe in the divinity of 
Christ." And when the candidate, overwhelmed 
with the consciousness of his spiritual darkness, 
answers, "I do not understand," the church, with a 
fine and complacent accommodation, says, "Well, 
that does not matter. The explicit faith, the faith 
of knowledge and of understanding, is with the 
church. The measure of your obligation is im- 
plicit faith, the faith of trust and dependency. 
All you need to do is to have an implicit faith in 
the explicit faith of the church, and your salva- 
tion is assured." This is not a very noble way, 
but it is certainly a swift and smooth way to the 
City of God. The advantage of it is that it sim- 
plifies enormously the problem of salvation. The 
disadvantage of it is that it imprisons the intel- 
lect, blunts the conscience and retards the growth 
of the soul. I do not write these words in criti- 
cism of the great institution to which we are all 
indebted beyond the power of gratitude to repay. 
I admire the Roman church for the munificent 
mercy of its theology, as I delight in the ornateness 
of its ritual and the impressive dignity of its mass. 



232 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

Happily, the cardinal concern of religion is not 
with the intellect, but with the heart. God is 
love. To love and to live in love; to love na- 
ture and to love man; to live in the love of na- 
ture; to live in the love of man — this is religion: 
this is worship in the finality of its excellence, the 
completion of its beauty. We are never so near 
to the Infinite; we are never so completely, so in- 
divisibly one with the Eternal, as when we are liv- 
ing with a noble spaciousness and a consuming pas- 
sion in the simple human loves of our heart. Love 
is the celestial vision of God. Love is the supernal 
instinct with which we feel God. It is the free- 
dom of God within our will. It is the joy of God 
within our heart. It is the worship of God within 
our spirit. When we live in the love of father 
or mother, sister or brother, or friend; when we 
are lost and submerged in the ineffable passion, 
in the pulsing ardor of our love for the beloved, 
we are living in God. Divine love is not one love 
and human love another love. They are one and 
indivisible, of the same origin and essence. Hu- 
man love is divine love integrated with the heart 
of man. Divine love is human love integrated 
with the heart of God. Love is, in the sphere of 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 233 

the spirit, the ultimate sacrament. It is a sacra- 
ment of divine light, a sacrament of divine beauty, 
a sacrament of divine praise. Some future day, 
when man, quickened by the inner motions of the 
spirit, or sufficiently illumined by the wisdom that 
falls from the lips of Time, the one patient and 
inerrant teacher, awakens to a realization of the 
marvelous simplicity of the revelation of the Eter- 
nal in the personality of the Jesus of history, he 
will live and exult in God with the freedom, with 
the spontaneity, with the naturalness, with the per- 
fect unconsciousness with which the normal spirit 
lives and exults in its element, the normal body. 
He will know, then, that God is not a definition 
of the intellect, a formula of reason. He will 
know that God is the great, sweet, vague spirit of 
the universe; that He is love, and that to abide 
in love is to abide in the knowledge of God; that 
to rejoice in love is to worship God with highest 
reverence and supremest praise. 

And just for the reason that the sacrament of 
love is the final revelation of God, it is the final 
righteousness of man. It is not only the consum- 
mation ; it is the source of law. It is the criterion 
of conduct and the touchstone of morality. The 



234 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

holiness of the heart is the only holiness endued 
with a strength adequate to the moral redemption 
of the individual and of humanity, that can bend 
the heavens to the earth and lift the earth to 
heights where it is, in its vibrations, in its motions 
and in its passions, one with the fair perfection 
and the unblemished loveliness of the Infinite. 

Where shall we turn for the counsels of wis- 
dom to regulate us in the conduct of life, if not to 
the oracle of love which prophesies in the temple 
of the hearth We are told that we must look for 
moral guidance, for the canon of thought and the 
standard of conduct, for the vision that will re- 
veal to us the way of righteousness, for the ideals 
that will ennoble our character and deify our ac- 
tions, to tradition, to the ethical norms of so- 
ciety, to the consent of the nations, to the custom 
and usage of civilization. But, alas! tradition 
varies with times and seasons, with countries, na- 
tionalities and races. One age affirms as moral, 
as noble, as holy, as divine, the ideal, the attitude, 
the conduct that a later age rebukes as evil and 
condemns to infamy. Tradition demanded the re- 
lease of Barabbas, the malefactor. The same tra- 
dition crucified the gentlest soul that ever shed a 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 235 

ray of light upon the way of man shadowed with 
sorrow and with sin. The communal conscience 
of Athens put the cup of hemlock to the lips of 
Socrates. And twenty centuries later, the con- 
science of the people, the morality of the multi- 
tude sent Servetus to the stake because of his 
heretical theories regarding the mystery of the 
Trinity. The dominant tradition of Catholic Eu- 
rope of the fifteenth century sanctioned the mas- 
sacre of St. Bartholomew and the unspeakable 
cruelties and horrors of the Inquisition. The con- 
science of Protestantism, inflamed with the blood 
lust of dogma, with an equal hate and an equal 
indifference to justice, imposed innumerable tor- 
tures and the penalty of death upon the Catholic 
because he was unorthodox by way of excess, and 
upon the Quaker because he was unorthodox by 
way of deficiency. The stern and somber con- 
science of the Puritans, in an age whose bigotry 
lent itself easily to the sophistries of credulity, in- 
stigated them to treat with an insanity of rigor the 
unfortunate women who were suspected of sooth- 
saying and sorcery, and to enact the Blue Laws, 
which robed life in a monastic gloom and made it 
an offense for a man to indulge in the sweet ameni- 



236 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

ties and to manifest the simple affections of home 
life on the Sabbath. 

When we scrutinize the moral norm of the av- 
erage man, the conception of the good and the 
beautiful of the man in the street, of our own day, 
the result of our scrutiny does not minister to 
pride. It does not reveal a standard of honor, 
of purity, of truth, of justice, acceptable to the 
man of fine ideals and delicate sensibilities. The 
public conscience is the conscience of the Chauvin- 
ist, the Philistine, the Hun. The public taste is 
a taste that revels in the abnormalities, the hor- 
rors, the lubricities, the scandals, the moral and 
emotional pathologies of society. The national 
decalogue of Germany — not the decalogue merely 
of its criminals and its soldier caste, its thugs and 
its underworld, but the decalogue of its Kaiser, 
its statesmen, its artists, its litterateurs, its pro- 
fessors, its doctors of divinity; the men who rule 
in the places of distinction in the church, the deans, 
canons, bishops, archbishops, cardinals — the na- 
tional decalogue of Germany gives its sanction 
to the vice of cowardice, the unchivalrous treat- 
ment of non-combatants, the unarmed man, the 
weak and aged woman, and the little child, by 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 237 

the soldier clad in shining armor and holding the 
sword of steel in his mailed fist; gives its sanction 
to a vice yet more detestable than cowardice, the 
vice of perfidy, of the broken pledge and the vio- 
lated troth. 

The conscience of the world, the ethos of hu- 
manity at large, as we behold it within the bounds 
of the civilization of these latter days, neither 
compels our admiration by its nobility nor atones 
for its deficient nobility by its gentleness and 
grace. The canon by which we measure pros- 
perity is largely a physical canon. We reward 
with lavish emolument the man who provides for 
our physical comfort. The prosperous men, the 
men of power and triumph, in America, in Eng- 
land, in France and in Germany, are the brewers, 
the packers, the merchants, the stockbrokers, the 
shipbuilders, the manufacturers, the bankers and 
the landowners. The large stipends have not gone 
and do not go to compensate the men of science 
and of literature, such as Herbert Spencer, Hux- 
ley, Emerson, Lowell, Pater; the poets, Patmore, 
Swinburne, Francis Thompson, Sydney Lanier; 
the artists, Blake, Turner, Innes; the masters, the 
principals, the presidents of schools, colleges and 



238 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

universities, Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Jowett of 
Balliol and Woolsey of Yale; the men of the 
spirit, the prophets of righteousness, Frederick 
Robertson, Frederick Denison Maurice, Henry 
Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks. The large 
stipends have gone and still go to the men with 
a talent, with a genius, for physical interests and 
material enterprise — to the sellers of bonds and 
stocks, the heads of industrial institutions, the un- 
derwriters of international loans, the speculators 
in gold and silver mines, the promoters of real 
estate and commercial syndicates. 

Observe, again, the drama, the opera, the novel, 
the newspaper of our day! Surely the study of 
these institutions of democratic culture does not 
leave upon one's mind an impression of the re- 
finement and trustworthiness of the tastes of the 
commonalty. The drama is trivial, morbid, erotic. 
The opera is sensuous, hysterical, and its dominant 
note is lubricity. The one tyrannical and hyp- 
notic theme of the modern novel is the eternal tri- 
angle. Its morality is the morality of the Philis- 
tine, and its literary style is more conspicuous for 
its slovenliness, its crudity and its formlessness 
than for its dignity and charm. Excise from the 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 239 

pages of the newspaper the interests of sport, the 
horrors of fire, flood and famine, the catastrophes 
of war, the vulgar scandals of the day, in the 
political world, in society and in the home; the 
inane and coarse cartoons, not even amusing in 
their absurdity and grotesqueness ; the arts and 
crafts of the boudoir; the riot of cheap wit; the 
banalities of the professional writers of the col- 
umns that deal with physical culture and lay 
therapeutics ; the daily record of finance, the muta- 
tions of stocks and bonds — and after these various 
and drastic excisions, how little remains that has 
value for life, that sweetens the day with pleasant 
thoughts, that gives a tonic, a fillip, to the halting 
fortitude or the limping chivalry, that inspires one 
to go forth to fight the battle of life with a nobler 
zeal, with a higher buoyancy of nerve and of heart ! 
The more we study humanity — its morals, its pref- 
erences, its tastes — as it is laid bare to view by 
modern history, literature, the drama, the news- 
papers and by daily communion and habitual con- 
tact, the more conscious we shall be of its enor- 
mous potentialities, the more we shall pity it, love 
it, serve it, minister to its need; and the less dis- 
posed we shall be to consult it as a prophet of 



240 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

holiness, a critic of conduct, an oracle of beauty 
in life, in thought or in manners. 

There is only one authoritative standard of the 
beautiful life, of the conduct of pertinent fineness 
and loveliness, and that is the standard of the in- 
dividual conscience illumined by the light of sac- 
ramental love. I mean by "sacramental love" the 
love that is instinct with the passion of other- 
ness, whose motive is not self -magnification, but, 
rather, the redemption and enrichment of the 
world. The love that is sacrosanct by reason of 
its divine disinterestedness, its noble self-detach- 
ment, is found with constancy only in the great 
hearts of the world, in the hearts of St. John, St. 
Paul, St. Francis, Fenelon and Jesus. But it 
rises to the surface in lesser hearts in the luminous 
hours of life, in the hours of searching sorrow, 
in the hours when the world's piteous need and 
wretched plight evoke the divinity that abides, 
a latency, in every one of us, beneath the debris 
of the thoughts and emotions born of self -passion 
and self-interest. 

The self is too much with us — too much with 
us in business, in the state, in the church, in the 
home. And the morality of self is as cruel, as 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 241 

lacking in luster and loveliness, as hard, as Sa- 
tanic, as the morality of the multitude, the moral- 
ity of the man in the street, whether we meet him 
in Chicago, New York or London. The reason 
that corruption prospers like a toadstool in the 
night is because there is so much of self in poli- 
tics. The reason that finance is so treacherous, 
subtle and unscrupulous is because there is so 
much of self in commerce. The reason that the 
church is scourged with the same maladies that 
afflict the world — avarice, opinionativeness, arro- 
gant and pushing pride, insincerity and duplicity 
— is because religion is so impregnated with the 
virus of self. The reason that marriage is so often 
a squalor, a turbulence, an anarchy, an ignominy 
of petty discords and strident controversies, is be- 
cause the love that goes to the altar is too fre- 
quently self-love, and not the sacramental love 
that should burn, a divine fire, in the heart of the 
bride for the bridegroom, in the heart of the bride- 
groom for the bride. 

It is this ever-present obtrusion of self in all 
the interests and affairs of life that makes us some- 
what reluctant to concede to the individual con- 
science preeminency of authority in all that per- 



242 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tains to conduct, and that constrains us to abide 
in the fallacy discredited by the dark facts that 
succeed each the other with distressing fleetness 
on the pages of history, that the one sovereign au- 
thority in the sphere of righteousness is not the il- 
lumined conscience of the individual, but the un- 
illumined conscience of humanity — the humanity 
that fosters crime and then penalizes its victims 
for committing the crime it fosters ; that tolerates 
the worship of Venus and then, with brazen hy- 
pocrisy, brands her devotees with dishonor and 
shame; that discriminates against an institution 
by the imposition of a tax of the nature of black- 
mail, a tax the proceeds of which are devoted to 
the support of the civic constabulary and the pub- 
lic schools, and then bestows the wrath of its 
Pecksniffian morality upon the poor victim of alco- 
holism in the form of a fine or imprisonment; that 
listens with avidity to the cheap expediencies and 
the vicious opportunisms of its demagogues and, 
with a sullen, obtuse scorn in its heart, turns away 
from its masters, the men of wisdom and of man- 
ners, so richly qualified by their high endowments 
to counsel, to rule and to guide. 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 243 

In emphasizing the individual conscience trans- 
figured by love as the supreme and ultimate au- 
thority in the realm of morals and manners, I am 
not thinking of the masses of mankind. The hu- 
man world at large is, intellectually and morally, 
in the stage of adolescence. It is ignorant, way- 
ward, passionate, abounding in the prejudices, big- 
otries, antipathies of race, of class and of cult. 
It needs guidance, management and restraint. 
And as it has neither faith in nor affinity for the 
higher things, perhaps the most efficient police- 
man for the supervision and regulation of its con- 
duct is the conscience and the morality of the mass. 
The criminal, the wastrel, the thief, the drunkard, 
the vandal, the mendicant, the parasite, the dis- 
solute, the ignorant, the ill taught and inverte- 
brate members of society are incapable of moral 
initiative. They are children, and they can only 
achieve their meager destiny through the compul- 
sion of a force external to their own wills, the 
compulsion of the fear of pain or ostracism; the 
compulsion of the state, of public opinion, of the 
church. The world has not yet reached the point 
of development where it is beyond the sanctions 



244 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of the social priesthood and the ethics of the 
whip. 

But we are not immediately concerned with the 
masses of mankind. We are concerned with the 
few idealists of righteousness, the aristocracy of 
the spirit — with the elect that Isaiah had in mind 
when he cried out, "O Lord, save Thy people, the 
remnant of Israel!" In every age, in every na- 
tion, in every city, there is this remnant of Israel, 
the divine oligarchy of the good and the beautiful, 
who in meditation and prayer consort with the 
Infinite, who feast, with the voracity of a great 
hunger and with an intoxication of delight, upon 
the eternal verities and who strive with an un- 
speakable joy in their hearts "to make righteous- 
ness and the will of God prevail" upon the earth. 
The remnant is the world's savior. The remnant 
of Israel is the savior of Israel. The remnant of 
England is the savior of England. The remnant 
of America is the savior of America. The rem- 
nant of humanity is the savior of humanity. The 
remnant of the church is the savior of the church. 
God saves the many who dwell in the habitations 
of darkness through the vision, the fortitude and 
the refinement of the few who dwell in the abodes 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 245 

of light. The Eternal spoke in the solitudes of 
the monastery to Luther. Luther spoke to Me- 
lanchthon, to Zwingli and to Calvin. And this 
remnant of Israel proclaimed the mighty evangel 
and accomplished the Herculean labors of the 
Protestant reformation. 

The mystery of truth, of holiness, of love, un- 
veils its divinity to the eyes of the solitary 
dreamer. He is henceforth consecrate. He pon- 
ders, during the days of his novitiate, as did St. 
Paul in the wilderness of Arabia, upon the vision 
splendid until the day of his public ministry shall 
come. Then he, the prophet anointed of the Lord, 
whoever he may be — whether Alfred Russell Wal- 
lace, Oliver Lodge, George Meredith, Walt Whit- 
man or Edward Carpenter — goes forth to prophesy. 
He speaks. One and another stops to listen and 
to heed, until the apostolic body is formed, and 
in the power and the fire and the enthusiasm of its 
revelation the remnant moves forward to propa- 
gandize the head and heart of humanity and to 
do its part in the large and full redemption of the 
world. 

What stupendous tasks, what hosts of evil in- 
viting subjugation, what stupidities of custom im- 



246 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

ploring enfranchisement, what lusts and impuri- 
ties of convention petitioning for emancipation 
await the remnant of Israel, the apostolate of cul- 
ture, the missioners of the ideal ! The world is in 
sore need of enlightenment. It is pitifully in 
bondage to matter. It is lamentably enslaved to 
tradition and withed by the insolence of custom. 
It does not stop to interrogate the inner God, to 
ask the Divinity that dwells within the inmost 
sanctuary of the soul, "Is this right'? Is this 
just? Is this pure? Is this honorable? Is this 
the fine and stately thing to do?" It goes for il- 
lumination to the dull, suborned oracle of pro- 
priety and assuages its tradition-seared conscience 
by a perfunctory submission to the unmoral edicts 
of a hard and obsolete legality. When we see the 
men and women of our day selling their birthright 
for a mess of potage, crying with ever louder voice, 
like the children of Israel in the wilderness, for 
the fleshpots, prostrating themselves in degrading 
obeisance before Mammon, the god of this world, 
making food and finery and display their highest 
good, the be-all and the end-all of their existence ; 
when we see those who are in the high places, who 
constitute society and who are prominent in the 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 247 

affairs of business, finance and politics, more con- 
cerned about the trivial comforts of the body than 
they are about the illumination of their minds and 
the culture of their souls; when we see marriage, 
the most sacred institution of society, which more 
than any other institution involves the honor, the 
chivalry and the purity of its votaries, converted 
into a prison and made to subserve, not the behest 
of love, but the ambition for an establishment, 
and reduced to the shabby dimensions of a cere- 
mony that justifies, but that cannot purify, the 
metallic lust committed in its name and sanctioned 
by its authority; when we see on every side these 
pathetic perversions of the glorious talent of life, 
we realize the need of a higher goodness, a di- 
viner morality — the morality of the soul enlight- 
ened and enlarged with the righteousness that has 
its origin and sanction, not in the crass decalogue 
of public opinion, not in the obsolescent traditions 
of society, but in the eternities, in the justice and 
the purity whose dwelling place is the bosom of 
God, in the conscience of man made in His own 
image, the individual conscience, strengthened, en- 
nobled, sweetened and humanized by the ideal of 
life and conduct and manners whose authority, 



248 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

whose inspiration, is the holy sacrament of love. 
Love is in very deed the light of life, the soul 
of goodness, the solace of our struggles, the laugh- 
ter in the heart of joy, the substance and the coro- 
nation of our victory, the consummation of the 
law. It "beareth all things, believeth all things, 
hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love 
never f aileth. And now abideth faith, hope, love ; 
these three, but the greatest of these is love." 



CHAPTER XVII 

TREASURES OF DARKNESS 

With whatever suavity the forces of our spirit 
may move toward their goal, with whatever fa- 
cility the mechanism of our talents may operate 
in the accomplishment of the task allocated to 
them by personal preference or the pressure of 
conditions, life is bound to develop many fric- 
tions, to encounter many unpleasantnesses and to 
contend with many resistances in its meandering 
flow, through multitudinous and ever-varying ter- 
restrial experiences, toward the ocean of eternity. 
There is always some blemish that mars, some 
sharp, jutting edge of unpropitious circumstance 
that frets the felicity of life. Perfection is the 
prerogative of the Infinite. The fortune of man 
is shadowed by the incompleteness of his own be- 
ing and the evils that cross as a woof the warp 
of destiny. And the higher the spirit within him 
rises toward the zenith of its powers; the nearer 

249 



250 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

it approaches to the stature, the culture, the ethi- 
cal symmetry, the emotional sensibility of man in 
his great day of fruition, the heavier are the clouds 
that encircle him; the more painful the doubts of 
his mind, the intenser the sorrows that rest on his 
heart. 

Every excellence has the defect of its quali- 
ties. The excellence of the light is that it brings 
the beauty that is hidden in the darkness into 
visibility. Its defect is that it makes manifest, 
with an irritating indiscriminateness, the unbeauti- 
ful with the beautiful. With the same ray of 
light, it gratifies the eye with the delicate love- 
liness of the blossoms that adorn the branches and 
offends the eye by the revelation of the ugliness 
of the lizard that crawls on the trunk of the sour- 
wood tree. The elephant is strong, but it is de- 
ficient in agility and grace of movement. The 
male cardinal bird is exquisite in its coloring. 
Perched on the ultimate prong of a dead branch, 
when laved with the light of the sun, it shim- 
mers like a jewel; it palpitates with the soft and 
passionate red that burns in the heart of the ruby. 
But the very splendor of its adornment is its men- 
ace. It betrays the presence of the cardinal bird 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 251 

and invites the attack of the hawk. The superi- 
ority of the greyhound is the swiftness of move- 
ment that results from its peculiar structure, the 
length and sinuosity of its body, the strength and 
range of its legs. The inferiority of the grey- 
hound is that it not seldom misses its prey in the 
velocity of its flight. Its strength is weakness, 
and its speed is a hindrance. 

Man also is subject to this law, that every ex- 
cellence carries with it the defect of its qualities. 
The advantage of the pedestrian temperament of 
the peasant lies in its insusceptibility to the more 
subtle annoyances and the finer pains. The dis- 
advantage of the earthiness of the peasant lies 
in a corresponding and proportionate insuscepti- 
bility to the higher pleasures and the more ex- 
quisite stimulations. On the other hand, the vir- 
tue of intellectual culture, and of the acute and 
responsive sensibility that is the normal concomi- 
tant of intellectual culture, is that it greatly en- 
larges the area of interest, augments the power 
of achievement and intensifies the joy of living. 
But if culture has its blessings, it has not less cer- 
tainly its retributions. There is always a penalty 
attached to fineness of organization. The riddle 



252 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of the universe and the enigma of life develop 
pari passu with every extension of reason and 
every recession of the horizons of the imagina- 
tion. 

The elaborately evolved nerves that thrill the 
soul with sensations of inexpressible delight, by 
the delicacy of their structure and the rapidity of 
their vibration often imperil the health, unstabil- 
ize the will, convulse the heart with turbulent and 
morbid passions and menace the poise and sanity 
of the mind. The man whose conscience is im- 
maculate and in a high degree sensitive to the ap- 
peal and the compulsion of the ideal exults in the 
spirit of beauty in its form of final loveliness, 
clothed in its most resplendent garments, the 
beauty of holiness. Yet there is always associated 
with his keen pleasure in the beauty of the good 
an excruciating sensitiveness to the ugliness of evil, 
to indelicacies of thought and coarsenesses of ac- 
tion, which would give to the man of rougher 
mold not the least annoyance — nay, which might, 
as is quite frequently the case, afford him merri- 
ment and diversion. The earth grows both more 
splendid with the light of heaven and more somber 
with the gloom of hell as the eye of conscience be- 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 253 

comes more finely adjusted to the holiness of the 
Eternal. The world was to Jesus a beatitude and 
a crucifixion. His way was not more a via 
gloriosa than it was a via dolorosa. His crown 
of honor was a crown of thorns. With every 
higher ascent toward the summit where the ideal 
reigns in the resplendency of perfect beauty, we 
develop an ever-deepening consciousness of the 
sharp angles and the wearing maladjustments of 
life. We suffer in the measure of our superiori- 
ties. The area of the unknown enlarges with the 
area of our knowledge. The greater our attain- 
ment, the more humbling is the consciousness of 
our non-attainment. In every age and land, the 
unimaginative Pharisee praying in the temple 
thanks God that he is holier than "this Publican," 
while, standing afar off in the retirement of his 
shame, the Publican, his imagination aflame with 
the light of the spirit and oppressed with a sense 
of the unworthiness and the sin revealed by the 
spirit's presence, beats his breast and cries aloud 
in the anguish of his contrition, "God, be merciful 
to me a sinner!" As the shadow deepens with 
the increasing brightness of the light, so the dark- 
ness and the sorrow of sin deepen as the light of 



254 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

holiness waxes in the souL It is not Judas Is- 
cariot; it is St. Paul who calls himself "the chief 
of sinners." 

The world grows in materiality and coarseness 
with every increment of spirituality, with every 
sublimation of our thoughts, with every finer 
transfiguration of our loves. The progression of 
thought means the progression of mystery. It is 
love that touches life with pathos and that clothes 
death with the somber robes of mourning. The 
more we love, the more painful are the temporary 
lesions in the circle of our affections. And the 
more tenderly we love, the darker is the tragedy 
of the great, the final lesion, the lesion wrought 
by death, at once man's most ruthless enemy and 
his sweetest friend. As our faculties grow in 
comprehension ; as we present to the world a larger, 
fuller, finer consciousness, the world becomes more 
glorious, more wonderful, more enthralling in its 
majesty, more entrancing in its beauty, more and 
more surgent with the fire and the joy of life. 

And yet, as the glory of the world increases; 
as it becomes more dear to us; as the soul and 
the world are locked closer and closer in the em- 
brace of a vast, reciprocal passion, the soul, day 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 255 

by day and hour by hour, becomes more conscious 
of the fugitiveness of the great amour, the tran- 
sitoriness of its glory, the evanescence of its grace. 
Through all the long, the weary, the wonderful so- 
journ of man upon this planet, a vast sorrow has 
brooded over his heart, a sorrow that has deepened 
in its pathos and passion with the enlargement of 
his culture and the enrichment of his love, as the 
mist deepens upon the meadows in the mornings 
of autumn with the procession of the days. There 
is no end to the travail of his soul. Nature's law 
of compensation is immutable, impartial, inexor- 
able. The more superbly he lives, the larger, the 
heavier, will be the penalty he will have to pay 
for living. We ask our own souls; we catechize, 
even in our silences, each the other; we interro- 
gate the masters — Plato, Plotinus, Seneca, Epic- 
tetus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Paul and Jesus — 
who have pondered with deepest reverence and 
with most searching understanding upon the mys- 
teries of life; we seek, with unwearying patience, 
the solution of this mystery of pain, of suffering, 
of sorrow, the whence of the world's anguish, the 
why of the cosmic crucifixion, "the lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world," but the lips 



256 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

of the oracle are sealed. The great enigma dwells 
now, as it has always dwelt, in the deeps of an 
impenetrable reticence. 

The philosophy of the Christian church — a phi- 
losophy, however, unsanctioned by the teaching 
of its Master — roots the catastrophic element that 
mars with its dissonance almost every phrase of 
the symphony of life in the freedom of the will 
of man. Suffering, sorrow, evil and death are, 
according to the theology of the church, the bit- 
ter and logical fruits of original sin. The ravel 
came into the skein of the cosmos with the pri- 
meval aberrancy of human nature, with "man's 
first disobedience and his fall." This interpreta- 
tion of the tragic note in the drama of humanity is 
lacking in convincingness because the evil of ex- 
istence is not confined to the narrow area presided 
over by the will of man. It is the sad dowry of 
all life. The brute shares with man the search- 
ing pains of dissolution and the anguish of the 
wounded heart. If death be the unique wages 
apportioned to sin, then the whole world of life 
and sentiency that lies beyond the reach and the 
sovereignty of will must be in a state of sin, be- 
cause it is on a parity with man in the matter of 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 257 

the penalty of sickness and of death. The will 
of man has, no doubt, deepened the gloom of sor- 
row and aggravated the shrillness of the woes of 
tragedy. It cannot, however, be chargeable with 
the deadly virus that lurks in the fangs of the rat- 
tlesnake, with the massiveness and cruelty of the 
jaws of the lion, with the formidable claws of 
the eagle, designed to seize and to rend its prey. 
Man plays an important role in the drama of the 
world, but, though his talents be of a high order 
of excellence and his histrionism be august in its 
intensity and in its proportions, he is not equal to 
the part assigned in the Zoroastrian philosophy to 
Ahriman, the god of darkness, the creator of evil 
and the progenitor of the world's woes. 

The Karma of Buddhism, as a venture toward 
the vindication of the supernal equity, suffers, it 
seems to me, from the same metaphysical inade- 
quacy as the free will of the theology of Chris- 
tianity. Karma defers ; it does not solve the mys- 
tery. That the present catastrophe has its equa- 
tion in some antecedent perversity, some anterior 
incarnation of the soul, may explain why I do 
suffer at the present moment; but it does not ex- 
plain how evil ever got a lodgment in a universe 



258 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

whose creator is sovereign will and whose heart 
is large with infinite love. The tragedy and doom 
of the creature must originally have been contained 
within the plan and the purpose of the Creator. 
But how could a being who is infinite in power, 
wisdom and love decree a world into existence, 
the cardinal note of whose drama is the note of 
pathos, and whose song reaches its inevitable cli- 
max, not in a shout of triumph, but in a lamenta- 
tion of defeat 4 ? 

I think the only way to mitigate the problem of 
the world's suffering on this side of the eternities 
is to concede the infinity of the divine love and 
to limit the strength of the divine arm. The 
dynamic of the eternal will is vast, enormously 
vast, but by reason of self-imposed limitation it 
falls short of infinity. The great Artificer of the 
heavens, by the lordly decree of His will, can 
evoke visible worlds and constellations of worlds, 
suns, moons and planets into being from the latent, 
invisible stuff of the universe, but He cannot create 
something out of nothing; nor can He make a 
circle with the lines of a triangle; nor can He 
give the substance of truth to the thing that is 
false ; nor can He make the treachery in the heart 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 259 

of Judas one in sublimity with the fealty to the 
Eternal that dominated the heart of Christ. 
Mighty is Jehovah, but were He mighty in his 
physical creativeness to infinity, He could not, by 
the puissance of His desire, will into being the 
ultimate glory of humanity, the glory of char- 
acter, without the antecedent condition of struggle 
and strife. The supreme Moralist might have de- 
creed a spirit into being, the garment of whose 
holiness would be as immaculate as the whiteness 
of the freshly fallen snow ; but this holiness would 
be the non-moral holiness of innocence, and not 
the moral, the heroic holiness of character. Char- 
acter is the product of the storms. It is wrought 
out of the anarchies and perturbations of the spirit. 
It is achieved in the lonesomeness and the dark- 
ness of the night of the soul. Its way is the way 
of controversy, of temptation, of contest. Its 
theater of strife is the wilderness. Its emblem is 
the cross. 

We must judge life, with its dark treasures of 
desolation and sorrow and tears, not by the evasive 
casuistries of metaphysical theorists, but by the 
virile, stalwart, intrepid standard of pragmatism. 
The problem of evil, as in its origin and neces- 



260 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

sity it is articulated with the eternities, may be 
lost forever in the concealment that veils a thou- 
sand mysteries. If, however, the struggle, the 
bitterness and the servitude of life are the step- 
ping stones whereby we reach the heights of the 
soul's divinity; if through the commotion, the 
squalor, the tumult, the strife and the din, the 
discords and the pains of the world we evoke the 
buried life, we attain self-regency, we achieve the 
possession and the mastery of the higher self, we 
crown life with its supreme triumph — the triumph 
of character, the triumph of the God in us over 
the world, the flesh and the devil — then we have 
light enough to guide us on our way and to send 
us forth into the fight with a song in our hearts. 
And I am sure, whatever else may be doubtful in 
this world, that the Gethsemane in which human- 
ity has, through the ages, sorrowed and agonized 
and wept has its pragmatic sanction in the fact — 
confirmed, not only by the biographies of the great 
lights of history that rule the day, but also by 
the universal experience of the lesser lights that 
rule the night — that only in its shadows do we 
overcome the Apollyon and enthrone the Christ 
in us. 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 261 

The wisdom that tells us that "necessity is the 
mother of invention" is only the concretion in an 
aphorism of a universal law. All enterprise has 
its inception in a want. All accomplishment has 
its inspiration in a deficiency. Discomfort is the 
spur of industry. And poverty is the instigation 
of frugality. We labor with a greater ardor to 
attain the possession we have not than to keep in- 
tact the possession we have. The inspiring and 
exalting story of man's progress in his manage- 
ment of matter, in his mastery of knowledge, in 
his conquest of the treasures of the spirit, is a 
story of resistances overcome and obstacles sur- 
mounted. We grow by opposition, and we un- 
fold unto the stature of the full-orbed life by 
antagonism. Man has won his final prowess, the 
strength of his body, the resiliency of his muscles 
and the poise of his nerves, not by sitting in an 
arm-chair by the ingle on a winter's night and 
reading treatises on "how to grow strong," and 
"how to enjoy good health," but by the sterner 
method of buffeting with the oppugnant winds; 
by contending with the hard, resistant earth; by 
holding with tense arms the plow in the furrow; 
by smiting with the force of a Vulcan the ruddy 



262 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

iron on the anvil; by furling and unfurling the 
sails of the vessel as it sweeps over the sea, in 
sunshine and in storm ; by climbing, with slow and 
tedious steps, the sides of the hills; by walking 
with a free and eager stride over the prairies and 
the meadows; and by wrestling with the forces 
and the energies of nature, whose resistance is the 
substance of his vigor, and whose obduracy is the 
source and the stay of his strength. 

All culture is conquest. One does not attain 
power and clarity of vision by the inertia, but by 
the action and the strain, of the intellect. There 
is no easy path to learning. Light involves ef- 
fort. Illumination is the product of the major 
tensions and the petty frictions of the intellect and 
the will in contact with reality. All the treas- 
ures of knowledge — every fact, every law, every 
mystery of matter, every apocalypse of the spirit 
— lie secreted in the abysses of effort, in the in- 
most recesses of travail and strain. The "Divina 
Commedia" was not woven of diaphanous dreams : 
it was evoked from the toil and the travail of the 
years — from the wealth of sweet and bitter expe- 
riences undergone; from the multitudinous facts 
absorbed and classified; from the countless books 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 263 

of science, theology, ethics and poetry read, pon- 
dered and mastered; from the long and concen- 
trated observations of the spirit, the ambitions, 
the prejudices, the passions, the lusts, the virtues, 
the loves and the hates of man as they reveal them- 
selves in the individual, in church and in state, 
in monarch, in statesman, in artist, in scholar, in 
traitor, in patriot, in pope, in monk, in mystic, 
in saint and in lover; from the great titanic 
thoughts of Dante's mind, the passions, high and 
low, good and evil, of Dante's heart. 

And if it be true that the light of the intellect 
is only attained through friction, it is also true that 
the brighter, the finer the light, the greater is the 
friction, the greater the wear and the tear of the 
intellect. The content of the wisdom and the con- 
summation of the efforts, the studies and the medi- 
tations which stretch over the spaces of the more 
than three score years and ten of the life of 
Thomas Browne are confined within the small 
compass of two volumes — the "Urn Burial," 
known only to the few students who have an affin- 
ity for the eccentric and the quaint in letters ; and 
the "Religio Medici," of more popular appeal, a 
most noble book and, perhaps, when we consider 



264 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the age in which it was written, the most superbly 
catholic book in the English tongue. Francis 
Bacon — one of the two commanding minds of the 
marvelously fecund age of Elizabeth, of whom 
Macaulay says "he moved the intellects that moved 
the world" — concentrated his massive genius, his 
almost seventy years of observation, of academic 
learning, of sustained reflection on the facts and 
the laws of nature, the customs, the motives and 
the manners of mankind, in two immortal works, 
the "Novum Organum," which has interest chiefly 
for the scholar whose predilections are for science ; 
and the "Essays," which belong with the Bible 
and the drama of Shakespeare in the universality 
of their range, their influence and their charm. 
He wrought all the light and fire, all the labors 
and lucubrations, all the musings, scrutinies, crit- 
icisms, reflections and conclusions of his masterful 
intellect, all the trials, the struggles, the cynicisms, 
the skepticisms, the joys and the pathos of his 
heart into a single volume, whose wondrous 
apothegms are as instinct with effort as they are 
pregnant with wisdom. 

In the refinement of its spirit, the perfection of 
its form and the subtle delicacy of its prose, 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 265 

"Marius the Epicurean," of Walter Pater, is, I 
believe, the consummation of English literature. 
The style of this exquisite meditation on life in 
the mode of fiction is of ultimate finish, and the 
manner of its workmanship is of final loveliness. 
Marius, the young Roman, aristocratic, chivalrous, 
noble, sensitive, of the transitional times of the 
Antonines, is a portrait in miniature of the high- 
born soul of Walter Pater. His spirit travailed 
in labor pains for many years before it came to 
birth in the serene beauty, in the patrician fineness 
of the Epicurean. He died daily in his soul and 
in his art, that his genius might rise from strength 
to strength and from grace to grace. 

The larger and the more intimate our converse 
with the noble history of science and of letters, 
with the luminaries that have lifted the earth out 
of the twilight of its early morning and have 
flooded it with the light of knowledge — with the 
biographies of Goethe, Darwin, Faraday, Shake- 
speare, Hugo, Carlyle, Shelley, Hawthorne and 
Emerson — the more vividly we realize that every 
illuminating thought, every sweet meditation, 
every aphorism of wisdom for the enrichment of 
the mind and the guidance of conduct, every larger 



266 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

understanding of nature and of humanity, every 
fuller comprehension of the mysteries and the 
forces of the universe, every song, whether of epic 
grandeur or of lyric sweetness, is a treasure evoked 
from the darkness; and that the more resplendent 
the treasure is, the denser and the more difficult 
of penetration is the darkness in which it lies con- 
cealed by the strategy of a wisdom that passes all 
understanding. It is with the reluctance and with 
the slow apprehension of indolence that we learn 
that the lamp of truth burns only in the sanctuary 
of darkness, and that we must grope our way with 
persistency and with patience if we would win the 
light of truth, more beauteous than the light of 
rising or of setting sun. The Lord and Giver of 
all good and perfect gifts does not throw the 
torch of wisdom at our feet. It is not, as we 
would feign believe, in the superficial and cursory 
philosophy of the migratory prophet; it is not in 
the facile courses in literature, economics, ethics 
and art, in which we indulge with a wild intemper- 
ance of enthusiasm in these swift and shallow days ; 
it is not in the trivial, flippant books, written for 
the uncritical and irritating novitiates in the temple 
of knowledge, that we shall find the wisdom that 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 267 

enlarges and the truth that illumines the path of 
life. It is, rather, in the obstinacies of fact; it is 
in the veiled deeps of reality ; it is in the profundi- 
ties of universal law; it is in the vaguenesses of 
the world-process ; it is in the subtleties of the 
human soul ; it is in the secrecies and silences of the 
matter, the energy, the destiny and the spirit of 
the cosmos, that man finds the light of culture and 
the sweep, the sanity and the charm of the 
academic mind. 

Furthermore, it is in the darkness, in the shad- 
owed realm of doubt, suffering and sorrow — in the 
Calvaries, with their crucial griefs and their bitter 
failures, that await every one of us in turn some- 
where along the path of the years — that we divest 
our souls of the pretentiousness, the vanity and the 
unsocial pride that have held us aloof from the 
world, and become incorporate with humanity, 
one in consciousness and in affection with the 
vast multitude, with rich and poor, with the ur- 
bane and the rustic, with the learned and the il- 
literate, with the good and the evil of mankind, 
with the great democracy — the ungroomed, un- 
mannered, unenlightened, but none the less ro- 
bust, noble, heroic son of God. By reason of some 



268 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

perversity of human nature, prosperity in all of 
its forms of manifestation is deficient in the spirit 
of camaraderie. Strength is prone to be arrogant. 
Wealth tends toward exclusiveness. Culture in- 
clines to superciliousness. Godliness not seldom 
assumes the mien of pride. The sublime motto on 
the escutcheon of chivalry, "Noblesse Oblige," is 
not operative as an ideal in the conduct of our 
times, in which magnificence and grace of action 
are virtues "more honored in the breach than in the 
observance." We stand too near to the poverty, 
the crude circumstance, the social obscurity from 
whose imprisonment we have just been emanci- 
pated by the magic of our riches. It is inconven- 
ient to continue in the old friendships that remind 
us of the infelicity, the penury and the meager 
entourage of our origin, the gaucheries of thought 
and speech and manner of our autochthonous days. 
We lack the proud security of high breeding, the 
fine self -consequence that is the distinguishing 
mark of the man or the woman who is to the man- 
ner born. We do not know how to move in the 
new world, whose favor has been purchased by 
our fortune, with the suavity of approach and 
withdrawal, with the large, unconscious freedom 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 269 

that designates the bearing of those who inherit 
the most precious of all patrimonies, a tradition of 
fine manners, a natural, obvious dignity of mien, 
from an ancestry whose ideals are so matured with 
time that they are of the essence and the habit of 
the blood. 

The society that is proximate to the plow and 
the mechanic's bench is always morbid about its 
recently achieved honors, always nervous and in- 
secure in the bewildering intricacy of the new set- 
ting, and as "distance lends enchantment to the 
view," lacking the noble distinction of birth, it 
takes refuge in the ignoble distinction of the re- 
mote manner, the insolent air and the frozen mien. 
It is only the lords of our kind, as rich in the 
royal virtue of simplicity as they are in the treas- 
ures of gold, who can wear their eminence with 
a patrician naturalness of manner and with a 
noble kindliness of heart. With the lesser men — 
and in the realms of prosperity, of power, of learn- 
ing the lesser men constitute the vast majority 
— wealth is snobbish, strength is unsocial and cul- 
ture is exclusive. Our superiority estranges us, 
our distinction desocializes us and our excellence, 
whatever it may be- — whether an excellence of tal- 



270 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

ent, of taste or of craft — segregates us. And 
the deplorable consequence of these various pre- 
eminences is that the great, glorious world is 
broken into petty fragments, into hostile camps, 
into alien organizations, into classes and masses, 
into plutocrats and paupers, into citizens desirable 
and undesirable, into rich and poor, into those 
who are professional reformers and those who need 
reformation, into saints who grow impatient with 
the sinners and sinners who scorn the veneered holi- 
ness of the saints, into industrial groups, religious 
fraternities and social cliques, into clusters of stars 
of differing degrees of magnitude, splendor and 
importance. Humanity is not the noble solidar- 
ity of our dreams. It is millenniums distant from 
the day that celebrates the assembling of "the 
parliament of man, the federation of the world." 
The human world is a vast incoherence of 
schisms — race, national, economic, social and re- 
ligious schisms. And it is from the loins of these 
schisms, which are the offspring of the passion of 
preeminency, whence are born the ill-humors, the 
hates, the anarchies, the revolutions and the wars 
that ravage and desolate this earth and make man's 
life upon the earth, his brief and precious day, a 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 271 

strain, a tension, a burden, instead of the sweet 
delight it ought to be. 

Now, the Eternal, with a wisdom at once ruth- 
less and tender, has anointed and ordained the 
austere prophet of darkness to the divine task of 
restoring the ancient unity, of fusing the schismatic 
elements into concord ; of making, not only of one 
blood, but of one mind, one heart, one worship and 
one divinity, all the nations of men, all the peo- 
ples of the earth. There is cohesion in darkness. 
We separate in the light of day, but we congre- 
gate in the shadows of the night. We go our 
various ways under the tranquil sky, but when the 
storm breaks we seek a common center in search of 
the courage of companionship. There is differ- 
ence in laughter, but there is brotherhood in tears. 
A great soul, who suffered sharp indignity and 
harsh usage at the hand of Fate, said "failure is a 
great leveler." It is a bitter truth. There is 
democracy in adversity. The unity that we break 
with our victories we cement with our defeats. 
There is a tremendous social gravity in calamity. 
A modern poet sings "O sorrow, cruel fellowship ! 
O priestess in the vaults of death !" There is fel- 
lowship in sorrow. Races, nations, families, in- 



272 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

dividuals forget their antagonisms and their hos- 
tilities in times of great and searching grief. 
There is neither Slav nor Teuton ; there is neither 
Catholic nor Protestant; there is neither Moham- 
medan nor Christian in the sorrows that intone 
their dirge in the deeps of the heart of mankind. 

It is the man without race that battles against 
Satan in the wilderness for the mastery of his soul. 
It is neither Jew nor Gentile : it is man ; it is hu- 
manity that dies upon the cross. The world 
divides into numberless fragments in the power and 
pomp of Christianity : it is all one in the weakness 
and the suffering of the Galilean martyr. How 
wonderful in their truth are the words of the Prince 
of Peace, the High Priest of the divine brother- 
hood, "I, if I be lifted up, shall draw all men unto 
me." There is not only an ineffable pathos ; there 
is an infinite wisdom, an infallible psychology, in 
this evangel of power and compulsion — a power 
born of weakness ; a compulsion whose eloquence is 
the anguish of a broken heart. The supreme sig- 
nificance of the cross is that it symbolizes the return 
of humanity to the glory of its lost unity through 
suffering, weakness and humiliation. The broth- 
erhood of man is one of the superlative treasures of 



TREASURES OF DARKNESS 273 

darkness. Man must march on his way to the 
City of God to the accompaniment of the murmur 
of his sorrows and the music of his sighs. 

The high function of the catastrophic aspect 
of every life — of all doubts, sorrows, burdens, 
lamentations, defeats and crucifixions — is to over- 
come the schisms of immemorial antiquity, the 
schisms that separate mind from mind, heart from 
heart, man from man, and race from race; and to 
make us all one, a great, catholic democracy of 
love, a universal and divine fraternity of good 
will and peace. The wisdom of experience teaches 
us no lesson that is more important and more 
vitally related to our highest well-being than that 
he lives most like a god who carries his cross with 
unfaltering fortitude of will, who bears his suf- 
ferings with a silent dignity of spirit and who re- 
deems humanity with the sweetness of his sorrows, 
the kindness of his tears. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

ON THE SUMMIT 

"In the beginning was the Word, the Spirit, and 
the Spirit was made flesh" — matter — "and dwelt 
among us, full of grace and truth." I think one 
would search the world of philosophy in vain for 
a more succinct, a more intelligible theory of crea- 
tion than is bound up in these words, which are 
the quintessence of Christian theology. This in- 
terpretation of the mystery of origins has the 
merit of inclusiveness. It is synthetic. Spirit, in 
the cosmogony of St. John, has the primacy over 
matter by virtue of the excellence of its properties ; 
but matter shares with spirit the dignity of the 
cosmic order. Spirit and matter belong to one 
another. They constitute a unity of being in two 
modes. Their union is co-extensive with con- 
sciousness upon this earth plane. They are every- 
where, within the horizons of actual experience, 
correspondent and cooperative. 

274 



ON THE SUMMIT 275 

Spirit, under the present limitations of our 
thought, is inconceivable without matter, and mat- 
ter exists for us only within the boundaries of 
spirit. We know nothing of thought, or will, or 
love, without form ; and we know nothing of mat- 
ter except as interpreted by our senses and denned 
in our thought. We cannot escape matter. It is 
the shadow of our consciousness. It lives with us, 
thinks with us, rejoices with us, weeps with us, 
suffers with us, dies with us; and it goes with us 
into the unknown. The immortality of a form- 
less personality is unthinkable. A soul — thought 
without expression ; love without incarnation ; will 
without embodiment — wending its way through 
the eternities in a pale abstraction of being is an 
immortality beyond conception. If it were con- 
ceivable, it would be less interesting than absolute 
extinction. Corporeality is of the essence of any 
thinkable, any desirable immortality. St. Paul 
does not teach the doctrine of the immortality of 
the soul which is regarded as orthodox by the 
church. He sings, in the sublime apostrophe to 
the resurrection in the First Epistle to the Corin- 
thians, of the immortality of man, "There is a 
natural body and there is a spiritual body." The 



276 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

spiritual body is, no doubt, as transparent as the 
ether and as viewless as the air, but the point I 
wish to make is that it is a body. Spirit and 
matter, in time and eternity, dwell together in 
the conjunction of an indissoluble alliance. 

Matter is a permanency of consciousness. It 
underlies all life, all power, all thought, all beauty, 
all spirituality. Every superior civilization has 
its roots in economic wealth and material pros- 
perity. Egyptian commerce was the pioneer of 
Egyptian architecture, the pyramids of the desert, 
the temples of Karnak and Memphis ; of Egyptian 
culture, its ethics, its philosophy, its religion and 
its worship, which have descended to our own day 
through the Hebraisms of Christianity. Greece 
was rich before it was academic and artistic. The 
wealth of its merchants preceded and made possi- 
ble the idealism of Plato, the realism of Aristotle, 
the drama of Sophocles, the lyrics of Theocritus, 
the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, the 
sculpture of Pheidias and Praxiteles, and the ora- 
tory of Demosthenes and Phocion. Material af- 
fluence is the handmaiden of beauty. It is to 
Pericles, the man of affairs, and to the men of his 
age who achieved the commercial glory of Attic 



ON THE SUMMIT 277 

Greece, that we owe the Propylseum and the 
Parthenon, the Athena Promachos and the Olymp- 
ian Zeus. The artisan is always the progenitor of 
the artist. The agora is the predecessor of the 
academy, in every country and in every civiliza- 
tion. It was the Medicis, the rich patricians and 
the masters of commerce — the shop owners, the 
goldsmiths, the usurers, the traders in foods, in 
silks and in jewels — that made the Florence of 
the early Renaissance — the Florence of philosophy, 
of letters, of art — the glory of its age and the 
admiration of the world. 

Matter is not only the foundation of civiliza- 
tion, the servant of knowledge, the forerunner of 
the academy, the patron of the humanities, the 
avant-courier of the graces and the amenities of 
art; it is also a force of epic significance in the 
individual life. However spiritual we may be; 
however high we may soar into the fine air of the 
Emersonian over-world; with whatever passion 
of emphasis we may deny this mundane scheme of 
things, the fact is, we are prisoners to the author- 
ity and the charm of matter. We think and we 
dream matter; we touch and we taste matter; we 
see and we hear in the terms of matter; we live and 



278 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

we love in the vibrations of matter; we act upon 
others and others act upon us, we communicate 
with others and others communicate with us, 
through the medium of matter, and exclusively 
through the medium of matter. Formless thought 
is incommunicable thought. Bodiless love is love 
without significance or impact. We know mother- 
hood, not as some occult essence, but by the sooth- 
ing touch of the mother's hand, the tender light in 
the mother's eye. We know the sweetness, the 
grace, the rapture of the love of the beloved, not 
through the pale stuff of insubstantial dreams, but 
through contacts and communions of unutterable 
subtlety. And we behold the power, the majesty 
and the love of God, not in the void and shapeless 
realm of space, but in the glory of the light of 
day, in the pensive, tranquil beauty of the stars 
by night, in the rugged strength of the scarped 
cliffs, in the roll and the roar of the sea, in the 
lyrics of the birds, in the grace and aroma of the 
flowers. Nature was an apocalypse of the "divin- 
ity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how 
we will" to the God-enraptured vision of Jesus. 
"Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, 
neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that 



ON THE SUMMIT 279 

even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
one of these. Wherefore if God so clothe the 
grass of the field which to-day is and to-morrow 
is cast into the oven, shall He not much more 
clothe you, O ye of little faith !" There is more 
divinity in the ray of light that leaps to gladden 
the eye from the yellow heart of the jonquil than 
is to be found in all the metaphysics of the ages, 
from the dialogues of Plato to the "Creative Evo- 
lution" of Bergson. 

And yet, though the material world be fraught 
with ministries of light and beauty, with the vigor 
and the glow, the elixir and the joy of life, it is 
important that we should learn that it is not an 
end in itself, but a means, the means of self-real- 
ization. The summum bonum of life is not the 
prosperity of matter, but the prosperity of the soul. 
Matter is not the permanent residence; it is the 
temporary lodging place of the spirit. The world 
is not a goal ; it is a process. Wealth is not life ; 
it is the instrument of life. Nature is not God; 
it is a prophet, without race or nationality, the one 
catholic, universal revelation of God. We must 
not rest in the finite; it is our business and our 
duty to press on and move steadily forward — 



280 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

through all temporal and fragmentary experiences ; 
through the sights and scenes of the world ; through 
the illuminations of literature and the delights of 
art; through the splendors of nature and the 
praises of the temple; through the soughings of 
the winds and the sighings of the forest as it 
wrestles with the fury of the storm; through the 
myriad pleasures of sense; through the fugitive 
musings and dreams of the mind; through the 
strifes, the defeats, the victories of the will; 
through the emotions, the passions and the loves 
of the heart — to find our rest in the strength of 
the everlasting arms and in the serene deeps of the 
Eternal spirit. 

The highest hour that comes to man on this 
earth plane is when, standing on the summit of 
some wondrous experience — some elation of the 
mind entranced by the splendor of the celestial 
vision, some ecstasy of the soul enchained by the 
hypnotic beauty of the world, some exaltation of 
the heart in the emotions of an overwhelming and 
gloriously self -forget ting devotion, some sudden 
bursting forth of divine love in the solitude and 
silence of prayer — he realizes for the first time, 
and for all time, that the world's forces, great and 



ON THE SUMMIT 281 

small — all of life, from the dawning to the setting 
of its sun; all the mottled, multiform drama of 
the soul of man, its hungers, its thirsts, its ambi- 
tions, its longings, its conquests, its failures, its 
loves, its hates, its joys, its sorrows, its virtues and 
its sins — dwell in the light and accomplish the 
purpose and abide in the love of the Infinite spirit. 
"Life in God and God in life," as Malebranche 
puts it; man enveloped in God and God incarnate 
in man; the self engulfed in the Infinite and the 
Infinite inhabiting, ennobling and enlightening the 
self; to be submerged, imprisoned in and expanded 
with the spirit of the universe, the vast, unhori- 
zoned, cosmic love — this is the supreme beatitude ; 
this is the final triumph, the ultimate summit of 
life! 

As if impelled by a subconscious tendency that 
transcends the logic of the conduct of life as the 
pellucid sky by day transcends in purity, delicacy 
and loveliness the gray-brown soil that we press 
beneath our feet, however material our standards 
of action, however metallic and physical our ideals 
of felicity may be, we crown with our approbation 
and reverence, not the men mighty in the matters 
and affairs of time, but the men of the spirit, the 



282 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

men of light and of holiness, the men of love and 
devotion, the men of God, who, while kneeling to 
pray in the sanctuary, in the wilderness, in the 
forest, or on the mountain top, have bathed their 
brows in the light of the sun. A voice has spoken 
to us in the midst of all our greed, our lust, our 
selfishness and our sin; and it has told us that 
these beautiful souls are the chosen of the Eternal ; 
that they, these impracticable dreamers, these mys- 
tical visionaries, these children of the light, these 
poets of the spirit, these ethereal denizens of the 
over-world, have discovered the perfect way, have 
found the treasure of great price, have entered 
into "the joy of the Lord" and won life's last and 
greatest victory, "the peace that passeth all un- 
derstanding." 

The soldiers of fortune, the men mighty in 
finance, the rich, the powerful, the dominating 
masters of their peoples and their generations, come 
and go and the waves of the sea of time settle 
over them and we forget them, as at night we for- 
get the fugitive impressions of the early morning. 
There is none so obsequious as to uphold their 
majesty, and none so poor as to do them reverence. 
The gladiators of the sword — Philip of Macedon, 



ON THE SUMMIT 283 

Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, Charlemagne and 
Charles Martel — come and go, and though we re- 
member them, we do not cherish them in our affec- 
tions. But the holy men, the saints, the devotees 
of the spirit, the Elijahs of all nations, the Bud- 
dhas of all ages and the Christs of all peoples, the 
prophets who in bitter, aching loneliness and in 
the midst of the menacing, hostile multitudes have 
lifted up a standard for the people, the monks who 
have, in the silence and the cheerlessness of their 
cells, agonized for the world's salvation, the meek, 
the gentle, the magnanimous, the pitiful redeemers 
who have lived in ostracism and died in anguish, 
that they might make more visible to the world 
the authoritativeness and the beauty of the ideal 
— these fair children of the Most High we not only 
remember, we revere, adore and exalt them in the 
sanctuary of memory; we enshrine them in the 
love of our heart. They command our reverence 
because we know that they belong with the gods, 
and they compel our devotion because an inward 
witness tells us that they are the real masters of 
life, the only monarchs of this world who wear 
their crowns by divine right. 

The disadvantage of the life on the summit of 



284 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the spirit is its vagueness, its insubstantiality, the 
indeterminateness of its outlines. The advantage 
of it is the eternalness of its achievements, the 
reality of its blessings, the divineness of its con- 
summations. It is a life of noble and impressive 
dignity. The cloud that rests upon these mortal 
days of ours, and touches them with a subtle mel- 
ancholy, is the apparent fragmentariness and in- 
consequence of all things, of all experiences. 
There is majesty in the obduracy, the perversity, 
of the human will. There is a solemn dignity in 
sin. There is a Promethean sublimity in man's 
defiance of the sovereign authority of the reigning 
Zeus. The soul is clothed with the splendor of 
its heroic setting when, in superb temerity, it con- 
tends with the lightnings; and even when it suc- 
cumbs, there is a tragic greatness in its defeat. 
But the eventless hours, the routine of the days, 
the endless reiteration of petty thoughts and ac- 
tions, the wearisome grind of the habitual task, 
the lack of obvious and unique significance in the 
bulk of our accomplishment, the drabness of our 
motives, the cheapness of our interests, the transi- 
toriness of our efforts and the utter negativity of 
our influences — this is, I think, the wormwood and 



ON THE SUMMIT 285 

the gall of life. "O mighty Csesar, dost thou lie 
so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, 
spoils shrunk to this little measure?" These 
words of lamentation spoken by Marc Antony in 
the forum of Rome over the body of the mightiest 
Roman of his times, however inapplicable they 
may be to the great Csesar of history, are strikingly 
pertinent to a yet greater Csesar, the Csesar of hu- 
manity. 

When we measure life by its definable values, by 
its manifest achievements, by its calculable results, 
by the evidential worth of its thoughts, its loves, 
its performances, what a thing of penury, what a 
colorless, jejune, unimpressive drama it seems for 
the most part to be ! It is an utter pathos. The 
denouement is a poor and pitful anticlimax, so 
incongruous with the high dreams of the morning 
of life, so unworthy of the imperial faculties and 
powers of the soul. 

But what a royal dignity the spirit of man 
wears when we think of it as ensphered in the In- 
finite, as inwrought with the Eternal processes, as 
an ever-living word in the stupendous drama of 
the universe! It is only when we dislocate life 
from its cosmic setting that it becomes cheap and 



286 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

paltry and lusterless. When we behold life in the 
great scheme of things, in the oceanic roll and 
movement of the world-purpose; when we think 
of the individual spirit as a part of the Eternal 
dynamic, as an agent, a minister, a plenipotentiary 
of the Supreme Highness; when we contemplate 
every thought, every act, every heroism, every 
struggle, every love, in the vastness, the sublim- 
ity, the inconceivable glory of "the one far-off, 
divine event toward which the whole creation 
moves," then life is divine with the divineness of 
the world of which it is a part, and every move- 
ment of life, however minute and valueless it may 
seem in detachment, is pregnant with the power of 
an endless meaning; and every deed, however 
modest and inconspicuous it may be in separation, 
is large with the largeness and beautiful with 
the beauty of the ultimate consummation. The 
life of man is a life of ineffable dignity. It is 
clothed with celestial majesty. It is august with 
the intention, with the wisdom, with the duration 
of the supernal purpose when we live and walk 
in the spirit, when we dwell on the summit of 
prayer, meditation, love and action, with the 
eternities in our mind and God in our heart. In 



ON THE SUMMIT 287 

the finite, when contrasted with the ideal, every 
life is an apparent failure — a bitter, sorrowful 
failure. In the infinite every life is a real triumph, 
a glorious victory. In time life is an incoherence 
of dull and inconsequential fragments. In eter- 
nity it is a sublime totality, all its broken efforts, 
its trivial moments, its vagrant dreams, its wan- 
dering moods wrought together in a divine comple- 
tion, a transcendental unity of power, wisdom, 
holiness and beauty. 

Then, again, life upon the heights moves for- 
ward in the accomplishment of its destiny with 
the royal ease and the fine carriage of perfect free- 
dom. It rejoices in a large emancipation. It has 
no concern for the morrow and no solicitude for 
the day. It wears, with a sweet comfortableness 
and with a beautiful unconstraint, the ample and 
flowing garment of "the glorious liberty of the 
children of God." It exults in the freedom of 
the truth. It follows the light with undaunted 
heart, wherever it leads — whether to the radiant 
beauty of the Mount of Transfiguration or to the 
desolation of the wilderness, whether to the calm 
and the peace of the home at Bethany or to the 
hate and the violence of Calvary. 



288 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

What a sad, craven, temporizing, opportunistic 
thing we make of life upon this earth plane ! We 
are in servitude to hesitation, to dubiety, to fear. 
We fear poverty. And yet the great souls of all 
the ages have dwelt in habitual companionship 
with poverty, living out their stern, heroic days 
in a noble disdain of the comforts, the luxuries, 
the vanities which we, in these voluptuous times, 
identify with the essence of our felicity and in 
exchange for which we sell the birthright of the 
God in us. 

We fear public opinion, the criticism, the chas- 
tisement of the unenlightened mob that reads with 
avid interest the last puerility in fiction, but that 
nods over Dante and yawns over Shakespeare, 
that in every realm has ignored genius and ap- 
plauded mediocrity, that in every generation has 
shown its preference for Barabbas the malefactor 
rather than for Jesus the redeemer, "the chief est 
of ten thousand and altogether lovely." 

We fear to suffer, to encounter indignity, scorn 
and ostracism, to bear "the slings and arrows" of 
outrageous fortune. Yet we know, with the same 
certainty that we know a straight line is the short- 
est distance between two given points in space, 



ON THE SUMMIT 289 

that suffering is the katharsis that cleanses the soul 
of its distempers, its grossnesses and its impurities ; 
that it is the stuff out of which stalwart manhood 
is formed; that it is the rough fabric from which 
we fashion the royal virtues and the divine per- 
fections of the spirit. 

We fear to live. The mind in us calls, not 
for tradition, but for truth, undimmed and un- 
veiled. The conscience yearns, not for the right- 
eousness of the average man — a righteousness as 
void of the charm of virtue as it is of the cour- 
age of vice ; a plebeian righteousness that hugs the 
earth, that crawls on its hands and its feet; a 
righteousness too poor for heaven and too dull for 
hell — the conscience yearns for the great, ample, 
free and fluid righteousness of the Eternal, the 
righteousness of a life that unfolds according to 
the law of its being and the genius of its struc- 
ture, as the flower unfolds to the touch of the sun 
and the kiss of the breeze. The heart longs for 
affection, to love and to be loved, to revel in the 
fervent heat of noble passions and divine amours. 
But we heed not the call of the mind for truth, 
nor the yearning of the conscience for holiness, 
nor the longing of the heart for love. It is not 



2QO EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

expedient that we should live. Life in its great 
moods, its commanding expressions, is an impru- 
dence, an inconvenience, an audacity not to be 
tolerated by the sleek, polite Pharisaisms of so- 
ciety; and hence we exhaust the divine forces of the 
soul in diplomatic compromises, accommodations 
and suppressions, to the defeat of our own happi- 
ness and the impoverishment of the world. 

We are all opportunists, and we are all oppor- 
tunists because we are in bondage to the fear of 
life. We pride ourselves upon our liberties. We 
speak in magniloquent phrases of our freedom, as 
though to vote for an alderman, or a member of 
Congress, or a candidate for the presidency of the 
United States were a sufficient freedom in which 
man may realize the regal capacities of his soul 
and the high emotions of his heart. The average 
man is as unfamiliar with freedom in its large 
and superb aspects — freedom of thought, freedom 
of action, freedom of conscience, freedom of im- 
pulse, freedom of affection, freedom of faith — 
as a child is unfamiliar with the magnitudes and 
the movements of the astronomic world. He lives 
in a hut, and freedom has its habitation in the sky. 
He lives in the morality of time, and freedom 



ON THE SUMMIT 291 

lives in the morality of eternity. He lives in the 
narrow opinions of man, and freedom lives in the 
illimitable amplitudes of truth. He lives in the 
stupid, deadening realism of tradition and cus- 
tom, and freedom lives in the exalting, the en- 
nobling idealism of the everlasting laws. 

With great wisdom, with a wisdom far deeper 
than his understanding, has man restrained his 
mundane appetites and propensities with the withes 
of law and the fetters of convention. So long as 
he is a slave to the flesh ; so long as he is in bond- 
age to things; so long as he makes the sensation 
of the moment his beatitude; so long as he lives, 
thinks, loves and prays in matter; so long as he 
exalts Mammon to the position of primacy among 
the gods, it is necessary to curb his basilar and 
destructive passions by the fear of ostracism and 
by the authority of the constabulary, as it is neces- 
sary to restrain the tiger by the iron bars of its 
cage. 

Freedom is not of the earth ; it is of the heavens. 
It is not the privilege of the flesh ; it is the privilege 
of the spirit. It is not the portion of those who 
consort with the powers of darkness, the principali- 
ties and dominions of evil in the valleys; it is 



292 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

the portion of those who consort with the angelic 
hosts upon the summit of the spirit. When the 
ideal is our master passion; when the dominating 
desire of our heart is to be holy as God is holy 
and perfect as God is perfect; when we are en- 
amored of the beauty of the good as we are now 
enamored of the show, the pomp, the glitter, the 
vanities and the baubles of this world; when we 
live with high delight and quivering bliss in our 
empyrean dreams and loves; when every thought 
of our mind, every motion of the blood in our 
veins, every impulse of our nature, every urgency 
of our desire seeks the sanction and obeys with 
implicit obedience the behest of the over- world; 
when we make the fair spirit of truth our guide 
and the holiness of the heavens our monitor, then, 
and then only, are we free with the freedom that 
magnifies the soul, that crowns life with felicity, 
that ministers to the nobler prosperity and the 
larger salvation of mankind. 

Freedom is far ranging in its flights. The 
boundless spaces are its habitation. It cannot live 
in the lowlands of terrene thoughts and carnal 
ambitions. It pines and frets and wastes in the 
prison of the flesh. It loses its song in the shad- 



ON THE SUMMIT 293 

owed realm of matter. Its empire is on the peaks 
of life, in the sunlit dreams, the sacramental 
thoughts, the chaste desires, the ardent, consum- 
ing loves, the heaven-laden prayers of the soul. 
On these heights it is your privilege, and mine; 
it is the sweet and regal privilege of the least, as 
it is of the greatest of men, to stand redeemed and 
crowned — our minds radiant with the splendor of 
the vision, our hearts surging with the elan of 
life and singing with the joy of victory — "the 
owners of the spheres" and the possessors of the 
inheritance of the saints. 

And what life is comparable in service to hu- 
manity with the life that is lived in the light and 
the beauty of the eternities^ The business of this 
world, the grinding and the snarling of the mills 
of commerce, the rush and the roar of the trains, 
the whirr and the whirl of the marts of trade, the 
exchanging, the bartering, the banking — what is 
the ultimate sum of it*? How small in the sweep 
of life is its significance ! In the crucial moments, 
when the mind is confused with the bewilderment 
of some dire catastrophe ; when the heart is stunned 
with sorrow, torn with the anguish of an irrep- 
arable loss; when the eyes are filled with the 



2Q4 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

tears of affliction and we look in vain for the 
sweet, divine equations of our grief — what, then, 
does our commercialism matter"? At the very mo- 
ment when we most need its ministrations and its 
assuagements, it deserts us and leaves us alone 
with our heartache and our desolation. When 
our head is bowed before the austere and solemn 
mysteries of life and suffering and death, our 
wealth becomes an irony and our beauty turns to 
ashes. When we are burdened with the woes of 
life, we cannot find the peace for which we yearn 
in the wild speed in which we exult, in our light 
moods, as a sign of the greatness and the wonder- 
fulness of our times. When we are weary of 
heart, worn to the ultimate nerve and affrighted 
with the bitter disillusionment, with the pathos 
and nothingness of all that we have thought worth 
while, and life has lost its tonic and its stay, we 
do not turn for inspiration and solace to the finan- 
cial columns of the daily paper. We turn, as 
Tennyson did, to the celestial contemplations and 
the heroic meters of Shakespeare, or to the stoic 
meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or to the noble, 
martial, salutary letters of St. Paul, or to the 
soothing, tender, gracious words of Jesus. When 



ON THE SUMMIT 295 

we are stricken down with the blow that arrests 
forever the feverish activities of our life; when 
we are held, powerless, in the tight embrace of 
the last enemy, we do not seek the aid of the 
apothecary. In the drastic exigency of our mortal- 
ity we seek the Great Physician, and we trust only 
to the therapeutic power of prayer, which, if it 
brings not healing to our body, brings balm to our 
spirit. When the shadow of the great sorrow 
falls upon us and we stand, crushed, desolate and 
alone, by the bier of our beloved, we do not go to 
the banker for mitigation of the gloom that en- 
thralls our thoughts, for alleviation of the sorrows 
that rack our hearts. We go to the church, to the 
divine who is the ambassador of the Eternal on 
earth, to the priest, the minister, the apostle of 
Him who is the resurrection and the life. 

The test of the ideal life is not merely its ap- 
plication to the atomic experiences and the com- 
monplace moods of our habitual days. The test 
of the ideal is its illuminativeness, its operability 
in the sweep and the scope of the drama of human- 
ity, its pertinency, not only to our high and radiant 
hours, but also, and even yet more, its pertinency 
to the crucial hours, the hours of penitence, of 



296 EVERYMAN'S WORLD 

defeat, of sorrow, of requiem. And when we 
measure the greatness, the dignity, the efficacy of 
life by the test of its largest serviceableness, its 
fullest, richest worth to the world, its power to 
ennoble, to inspire, to comfort and to redeem- 
then we learn what is hidden from the casual vision 
by the drift and the debris of our mundane pas- 
sions and intensities, that the real king of his 
kind, the conqueror, robust, stately, magnificent, 
triumphant, is the man who dwells on the sum- 
mit of the spirit in blessed oneness with the In- 
finite, in happy concord with humanity, the lord 
of his own soul and the arbiter of his own destiny. 



THE END 



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Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 

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